A Month in Crosswords: Ten Questions Answered

I've gotten some positive feedback about this blog over my last few posts. At least five people who aren't related to me told me they like it, and although it's possible they were just being nice because I gave them my word lists, that's more than enough encouragement for me to start a regular monthly column.

This is the first entry of my A Month in Crosswords series. The questions in this post are all from real readers -- and by real, I mean fake.

1. What are the ethics of constructing/publishing a puzzle that is very similar to one already published?

The debut NYT puzzle of Andrew Linzer ran on Thursday, January 6. It's a well-crafted puzzle, with a very clever theme, but not a totally original one. Paolo Pasco published a strikingly similar puzzle in Fireball Crosswords a few years ago.

Because of the similarities, a few blog commenters took Andrew and the NYT to task, saying the puzzle should not have been published. Some of the more over-the-top remarks contained the word plagiarism. So, let me dismiss that one straightaway: It's not plagiarism. I can see how somebody who is not intimately familiar with the crossword construction universe might think that, but you can trust me that it is almost certainly not. Andrew says in the notes linked above that he didn't even learn about Paolo's puzzle until after his was accepted, and, being somebody who has seen multiple constructors independently come up with the same theme many, many times, I have no reason to disbelieve him.

But should it have been published?

That one's a bit trickier, but I say yes -- or at least I don't say no. I think constructors should put in a good faith effort of database/blog searches to try to avoid duplicating other people's already published work, but it's never going to be perfect; things slip through the cracks, even for the best constructors among us. So, I think it's okay for an editor to publish a "non-original" puzzle, but it shouldn't be a regular thing. It would be unethical, in my opinion, to publish constructors who are consistently poaching puzzle ideas from other venues, but if it's just a once in a while coincidence, it's totally fine. No harm, no foul, as far as I'm concerned. Congrats to Andrew on making his NYT debut.

2. So, if I'm a budding constructor, and I find a really great theme idea but it's been done before, what should I do? 

I suggest trying to change it a little bit -- try to find a different theme set, a different revealer, or some sort of other twist that would make the puzzle your own. There's certainly nothing wrong with piggybacking on another constructor's idea. If that weren't allowed then there wouldn't be a crossword puzzle industry at all. I solve, like, five puzzles a year where I think Wow! That's something I've never seen before!

The NYT puzzle from last Monday (1/24/22) is an example of this similar-but-different type of thing. It had a QB theme (QUICK BREAD, QUILTING BEE, etc.) with the revealer STARTING QB. Elizabeth Gorski also did a QB theme in a WSJ puzzle, but with a mostly different QB set and a different revealer, QB VII, the Leon Uris novel. (It was also published over a decade ago, so only weirdos like me would even notice.)

If there really is no good way to tweak a theme, then I suggest moving on to the next idea or just making a puzzle for practice. Aside from it being kinda shady to knowingly replicate another constructor's work without proper attribution/compensation, you give editors an easy reason to reject it. I know this from experience. Although, I say that, but it's worth pointing out that the NYT does recycle themes, sometimes even with some of the exact same theme entries. In fact, they just did it a few days ago. So... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

3. Have you ever had a puzzle rejected for being too similar to one that has already been published?

Yes, many times. Usually it's a puzzle that's already been accepted but hasn't run yet, so at least it's clear I thought of it independently. But still, it sucks to get beaten to the punch. Once, I submitted to the NYT a FULL HOUSE themed puzzle, in which each theme entry contained a three-of-a-kind string and a pair string (e.g., IT'S A ZOO OUT THERE), and it got rejected the same day this puzzle ran.

It's gone the other way too, though. Once Tracy Gray told me she had a puzzle rejected because it was too close to this X'S AND O'S puzzle (a Gulczynski classic). She's such a nice person, I felt bad, but, I mean, not that bad.

4.  What are your thoughts on CLEAN COAL?

CLEAN COAL became a point of discussion early this month when the prolific constructor Lynn Lempel put it in an NYT Monday puzzle. Personally, I think the term is an oxymoron, perpetuated by coal lobbyists to make coal consumption more palatable to the general public. There is a concept called carbon capture and storage, which, as I understand it, really does reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere while burning coal, but it still doesn't make coal clean, in part, because carbon is not the only pollutant produce by coal. Also, this technology is very expensive, and so it is not actually practical for wide-spread use.

With all that said, the term itself does not offend me, and I have zero problem with a constructor putting it in their grid. I don't think that using a term is a perpetuation or endorsement of the concept behind it. It also doesn't make me uncomfortable to come across terms like this while doing a crossword puzzle.

In general, I think I experience crossword puzzle solving differently from a lot of other people. I frequently hear solvers talk about puzzles being a "distraction" from the ills of the real world, or puzzling taking them to their "happy place," and those things have just never been true for me. It's too bad, really, as it sounds lovely. I'm jealous of that type of solver the same way I'm jealous of somebody who can fall asleep right when their head hits the pillow. (I'm a lie-in-bed-and-ruminate-endlessly kind of guy myself.) To be clear, I'm not especially distraught or anxious or anything like that when I'm solving a crossword puzzle. I'm my normal self, in a normal mood, so if I come across a disagreeable entry, it's not, like, a total buzzkill or anything like that. I just move past it, the same way I do when I hear an unpleasant news story (seemingly every news story these days) while making my kids breakfast in the morning.

Getting back to CLEAN COAL, I do think the NYT editing team erred by changing Lynn's original clue for it. Per her notes (linked above):

"Clean coal" as an answer gave me a slight pause because it's debatable whether there is such a thing. My original clue included something of a hedge ("Dubious term for a greener energy source"), but the editing team didn't think that was needed.

That's just a bizarre decision. I don't get it, and I strongly disagree with it. CLEAN COAL is a dubious term, and more to the point, the constructor wanted to qualify it as such. I could understand not adding a hedge if the constructor didn't have one in their original clue, but I don't understand removing one the constructor did have. Weird edit.

5. What about Harry Potter references?

I don't care much for them because I never got into the stories. I read the first book when it came out and thought it was... fine. (The fantasy genre has never been my cup of tea.) It's undeniable, however, that the Potterverse has become a massive subset of the pop culture universe over the past 25 years, so I'm not complaining that Harry and his pals (and acquaintances and enemies and teachers and magical paraphernalia...) pop up in grids so frequently. I just memorize enough to get by -- POTTERMORE and HORCRUX being this month's additions to my mental boy-wizard database.

I know there are a lot of solvers who would rather keep all things J.K. Rowling out of puzzles because of her controversial tweets concerning transgenderism. My take on all that: I don't know what she's said that's so bad. I mean I literally don't know what she's said. I go out of my way to avoid this story whenever it come ups. A wise person once said, "You don't need to have a take on everything." I've adopted that philosophy when it comes to J.K. Rowling. She was never one of my favorite authors; I don't know much about her; I really don't care what she says or tweets.

The Potterverse is so much bigger than her now, anyway, and I'm sure a lot of good people have done a lot of great work in it worth honoring. If you're turned off by Rowling, do what I do and think of the late, great Alan Rickman the next time you see a Harry Potter reference in a grid. But think of him in his Galaxy Quest role. That movie was surprisingly funny, as I recall.

Note: After writing this, I read this story about the "culture wars" of the NYT crossword puzzle. It touches on a lot of the general themes I've been discussing (and just discussed) on this blog. Because I got the link from Rex Parker's website, and Rex is usually very critical of Will Shortz (excessively so, in my opinion), I was worried it was just going to be a Shortz slag-fest, but it's not. It's decent and even-handed, and closes with the following quote by a graphic novel writer named Hayley Gold:

“In my experience, Will Shortz has been the nicest guy in the world. I hate all the articles that tried to slander him and make it like, ‘Oh, he’s this old white dude. And he’s trying to keep puzzles, sexist and racist.’…Change is slow and change is happening.”

Amen. No constructor or solver is going to agree with everything an editor does, and of course it's fair game to call somebody out when we think they make mistakes, but in my experience so much of the broad criticism of Will is just not accurate.

6. What was your favorite puzzle this month?

Favorite is an impossible adjective, but I really enjoyed a puzzle by Malaika Handa called "Dealer's Choice" that dropped in Fireball mid-month. It has a MONTY HALL PROBLEM theme, which, being 65% math nerd, is right up my alley. It also references the song "DA DOO RON RON," which I've loved since I heard it in an Energizer commercial as a kid: E-n-n-n-ergizer, it do run, run, run, it do run, run...

Incidentally, I solved the MONTY HALL PROBLEM the first time I heard it, in my head, during a five-minute walk between classes. My economics professor posed the problem to us at the end of a lecture, but didn't tell us the solution or give us any background on it. I thought it was just a fun little brainteaser, so I worked it out and didn't think anything of it. Only later did I learn a lot of really smart people found it so vexing. I now consider solving it so effortlessly the greatest thing I've ever done that nobody will ever care about but me. (The relatively recent time in martial arts class I took down four dudes in succession, all much younger than me, to win a toy WWE championship belt is a very close second.)

By the way, here's the solution I came up with: You want to switch doors if and only if your first guess is wrong; there is a 2/3 probability your first guess is wrong; therefore it is better to switch. It's an absolutely inarguable, ironclad proof as far as I'm concerned. 

7. Do you play Wordle?

Of course I fucking play Wordle.

It's really a silly game though. It's super easy to get it in six guesses and getting it in only two or three guesses is almost entirely luck. It's hard to be that good or that bad at it. Still, it makes me think about words and letter patterns, so I enjoy it. What I might start doing is picking a word at random to start with. That's probably more fun (if less optimal) than just starting with RATES every time, which is what I've been doing.

One thing I was I wondering is if it's a solvable game. Is there a decision tree that leads to guaranteed success no matter the correct word? I suspect yes, because each time you guess a word, you can't help but significantly reduce the relevant search space. If you guess "well" -- a lot of matching letters -- then that obviously greatly limits the possibilities, but if you guess "poorly" -- almost no matching letters -- that also limits the possibilities by the process of elimination. It would be interesting, and probably not all that difficult, to teach a computer to play something close to optimally and see if there are any words it couldn't get with certainty.

8. What's a crossword puzzle convention that annoys you more than it should?

The use of "for short" or "briefly" or some other such term when cluing an initialism or abbreviation that is at least as common as the full expression itself.

For example, if the answer is ALS we don't need the "for short" part in the clue "Lou Gehrig's disease, for short." People don't call it ALS because they are in a hurry, they call it ALS because that's what it's called. I bet a lot of people don't even know what ALS stands for. I might not even know -- acute lateral sclerosis? Nope. See, I had no idea that the first word is amyotrophic because almost nobody calls it amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It's just ALS, and that should be reflected in a clue. Some other common entries along these lines -- MBA, NFL, PHD, ICU, UCLA, IUD, and many, many more. For a person, we accept that often their nickname is their name -- you'd never clue TOM as "Quarterback Brady, for short" -- and I think we need to extend this more frequently to places and things.

In general, I think mainstream crosswords are way too heavy-handed with clue qualifiers, not just "for short" but also "in slang", "informally", "colloquially", and the like. I get they are supposed to give the solver a nudge, but to me they come off as incredibly fusty, a sign that crossword clues are lagging behind the evolution of the English language. BAE, for instance, still gets slapped with the "in modern lingo" tag, and it's been, like, eight years since I first heard that word. What's the scale here? I mean, in a sense, every word we use is modern. (Also, is BAE lingo? I think of lingo as being specialized speech among a specific group of people -- like, baseball fans have baseball lingo -- not just general neologisms.)

Concerning qualifiers, Stella Zawistowski brought up a good point in her review of the LAT puzzle from January, 22.

[T]he clue for LEARN, [Teach improperly?] really rubbed me the wrong way. I hadn’t thought about this much until recently, when I learned that at least one major puzzle venue avoids cluing words as “slangy” because slang to some might be standard language to another. I’m not sure I will never again use the word “slang” in a clue, but “improperly” here sure feels like an unnecessary value judgment.

Well said. We all speak how we learned to speak, and no matter how that is, it sounds right to somebody and wrong to somebody else. There is no definitive authority and no reason to judge.

9.  What do you think of the NYT's (relatively) new online submission portal?

I like it a lot. Part of me misses printing everything out and snail-mailing submissions, but a bigger part of me doesn't. I also like that they put a limit of three submissions in the system at a time per constructor. It saves me from myself.

10. Got any good ideas for future puzzles?

At the moment, not really. I have a document on my phone with ideas that now runs like 50 deep, but if any of them were any good, I would have made them already. Some of them are too simple; some of them are too complicated; and some of them I don't even know what they mean now (I have one that says "themes the breaks", and I don't know if it's a typo or if it's an idea about breaking themes or what).

The worst is when I like an idea but just cannot get the symmetry to work. This doesn't happen often, usually I can massage it somehow -- a 16-column grid, mirror symmetry, a different verb tense, etc. -- but every now and then I can't, so I just give up on an idea. I did that a few weeks ago. I was thinking about multiple discovery (call back to Question 1), and I noticed the phrases GREAT MINDS and THINK ALIKE are both 10-letter long. Then I thought of CALCULUS (8 letters), because that, to me, is the quintessential example of a multiple discovery. It was independently developed by NEWTON (6 letters) and LEIBNITZ (8 letters), and... Wait! 10-10, 8-8, 6 -- that's a puzzle!

But no, it isn't. Do you see the problem? It's LEIBNIZ, no T, only 7 letters. So, it's acutally 10-10, 8-7-6. How do you make a grid out of that? And there really is no way to change any of the themers. Sometimes you can use a plural to get the symmetry to work, but I can't call him NEWTONS. I could use a different theme example of simultaneous discovery, but I couldn't think of one, and when I looked at the Wikipedia page none of the other cited examples seemed very well-known. (Is the NETWON-LEIBNIZ story even that well-known?)

So, not knowing what else to do, I walked away from my computer and moved on with my life. Speaking of which...