Belatedly reading down some latter entries in a recent topic on the Crossword Centre Message Board, I discovered that I was being credited with the transfer of the ‘Nina’ concept from Al Hirschfeld to crosswords. Here’s my take on the issue.
Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003, though he just missed his own centenary) was a US caricaturist who specialised in cartoons of Broadway and film. Examples of his work can be found here. He was reputed to draw his cartoons without taking his pen off the paper (or, at least, any more than absolutely necessary). And he liked to include the name of his daughter Nina in the cartoon.
It helps to see it in capitals – NINA – and to imagine the letters disproportionately tall. You get a sequence of close-to-parallel lines which readily lend themselves to deployment as creases, or drapery or cross-hatching. (It wouldn’t have worked half as well if he’d called her Brenda.) A good place to look is where a man is kneeling – there may well be a Nina lurking in the creases of his trousers behind the knee.
I’m pretty certain Hirschfeld didn’t put Nina in all his drawings – at least, I recently acquired a book of pieces by S J Perelman, illustrated by Hirschfeld, and I haven’t found a single Nina. (Admittedly the adjacency of Perelman’s delightful prose is a major distraction.)
In crosswords, a Nina is a sort of hidden message. I’d categorise crossword themes three ways:
- Overt theme: where one answer is referred to in other clues; I’ve done this with operas, dogs, pasta, constellation – OPERA (say) goes in at number 8, and then TOSCA is clued with an 8 somewhere to replace the definition
- Ghost theme: a lot of the answers relate to a given theme – if you spot it, all well and good, but if you don’t then you can solve the puzzle as an ordinary puzzle; I’ve done this with novels by a single author, films by a single director, and so on
- Nina: a message winds its way through the grid, in (say) unchecked letters around the perimeter, or there’ll be a link between answers (multiple pairs of anagrams, say); most recently I used a grid with unchecked letters in the perimeter, while hiding IT’S NOT IN THE PERIMETER – er – not in the perimeter. Again you shouldn’t need to spot it to solve the puzzle, but it’s a bonus if you do.
The exposition above rather suggests I’m in the perfect position to have introduced the term (I certainly knew about Hirschfeld’s practice well before it made the jump to crosswords), but I don’t recall doing so. I’d certainly have echoed any such suggestion however, as the concepts dovetail beautifully.
I do have a suspect in mind, though…
When Jon Delfin and I used to discuss (by email) the things hidden in the Times T2 crossword, I started calling them Ninas. (Someone in the US-based National Puzzlers’ League had earlier used it to describe things I’d hidden in verse puzzles I’d written for them. I recognised the Hirschfield reference and it seemed natural to apply it to crossword “Easter eggs”.) I think Jon then carried the term over to the T2 bulletin boards (now probably lost) on The Times website, where it caught on.
Tony Sever started his RTC3 blog for discussion of the T2 puzzle on 1 January 2007, to supersede The Times’ forum. The first occurrence of “Nina” there was by Tony on 3 January 2007 (http://tony-sever.livejournal.com/1335.html), where he said, “And I spotted the Nina (PROFIT MARGIN and DOUBLE SPREAD) without actively looking for it, but not until after I’d finished the puzzle.”
Well, the suspect I had in mind (from seeing him use it on the Crossword Centre website) was Jon Delfin, so this looks like some sort of confirmation. It’s also likely that the reference Jon made on the Centre’s message board will be untraceable by now, so this looks like as definitive a story as we’re going to get. Future crossword historians, please note.