The topic of crosswords and their unfamiliar answers and clues has come up again. The usual suggestions are made that puzzles should have more up-to-the-minute content otherwise they appear out of touch. Many of the setters are older and have different points of reference. It’s hard not to see at least some of it as ‘Everything should be relevant to me’.
Once you’ve been setting for a few decades, however, you realise that this point comes up over and over again. What changes is the contemporary references that are being omitted. Why not have something on the Bay City Rollers, for example? Certainly that was levelled at setters whenever it was that the band was active (actually, it turns out they’re still active now, longer in the tooth, if not in the trouser). Or about such-and-such a TV show and its stars, or this footballer.
But in many ways, it’s the up-to-the-minute cultural references that really date a puzzle. Some of us are interested in having puzzles that can be revisited for the pleasure of solving the clues, not ticking off the contemporary references. When you upload old puzzles on to a website you have to check the clues and note that ‘Smith, perhaps’ no longer defines COMPTROLLER-GENERAL, and needs to be ‘Perkins, say’. (And when someone stumbles on the site in ten years’ time, they’ll be baffled again.)
The ideal is to strive for something that transcends a specific person, though obviously a particular set of letters or a specific name will always be tempting. But it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of weird politicians, vain pop stars, mouthy artists and so on about. Write a clue about that sort of behaviour and solvers will populate it with the current example of choice.
The issue abuts the question of general knowledge in puzzles. There’s an abbreviation used – nho – and just occasionally it seems to be wielded with the implication of ‘How dare you expect me to know that’. But my job as a setter is to clue words you may not have heard of in a way that still allows you to solve them. You can go and look things up later (in fact, you should). No-one can expect everyone to know the same things, and one of the pleasures of puzzles is to expand your database.
A few years ago I was faced with a clue the answer to which was clearly the name of a then current footballer. I had M_A_P_ – not actually terribly credible at first blush, but the word play threw up enough to pencil in M_APPE (still not hugely credible, but no indication of origin was given, and transliterations of language do offer oddities to English eyes).
But the first two letters were given by ‘Doctor’ – so was that MB, MD or MO? Yes, I know what it is now (and he’s still current; front page of BBC site as I type, indeed), but what to enter if you didn’t know? That’s the importance of getting the wordplay right.
There’s also the point of the huge variety of current culture. Here’s an excellent book:
You’ll note the blurb includes:
Enjoy hours of satisfying solving as you dive into inclusive puzzles that truly reflect modern life, from dating apps to activism, to the occasional body part–almost nothing is off-limits, except outdated crosswordese.
Having worked through several of them now (and they’re good fun) – I’d say no (and I do worry about that ‘occasional body part’ – has LEG or ARM never been used?). The ‘crosswordese’ is still there – it’s hard to imagine eradicating it in the fully-checked US style, where lots of favourite short entries keep popping up. But there are a lot of entries that do attempt to include modern, hip terms – but that includes some that, like slang, have gone out of use by the time they’re in book form. And some, like references to a whole panoply of US sitcoms and soap operas and sport, that have never had a wide amount of traction outside the country anyway. So there are corners of them that definitely feel exclusive, rather than expansive. The other thing called to mind is the brand-dropping common in so many modern novels – if the book is to survive then it will be needing footnotes almost immediately. Thomas Hardy managed not to invoke ‘Pink Pills for Pale People’, so unless you have some arcane way of knowing about the imperishability of Jimmy Choo, the tradename might be better avoided.
And you wonder, too, whether the diverse backgrounds of the setters overlap as much as they may think. Would a puzzle focused on Black themes resonate with a Latino audience?
That’s basically the problem with ‘knowledge’ (for which read, at least partly, ‘experience’) – it isn’t inclusive, it’s what you have. And when you set out to solve a puzzle your circle of knowledge comes up against the setter’s, and it’s the setter’s job to make the resulting Venn diagram as near a single circle as possible.
And for those who are still inclined to mutter about the ‘classics’ – they’re classic because they are still done, even if you choose not to go. But on a weekend when the news is of an injury to Ian McKellen falling off the stage in Shakespeare, it’s a bit hard to say Shakespeare is not current.
I am reminded of the furore around Milton Babbitt (Sondheim’s teacher) who wrote an article editorially entitled (much to Babbitt’s annoyance): “Who Cares if You Listen?’. Said article has been held up as arrogance by people who have not actually realised what is being said. Of course a composer wants to be listened to – but as to whether you, as an individual, listen, s/he has to be uncaring. After all, the person next to you in the audience may want to listen to something entirely different – can’t please you both. All the composer can do is write what they want in a way that reaches as many as possible – but they cannot target you specifically. Do not expect to like everything immediately.
[Thinking of listening: if you get the chance listen to ‘To Music’, the final track on Caroline Shaw’s new album ‘Rectangles and Circumstance’. Absolutely gorgeous – as they said on the listening party, if Schubert had had the chance to use steel pans he would have done.]
After a strange and extended session trying to log in to my page only to be told it was a phishing activity, I feel disinclined to spend much more time uploading a puzzle. But it is meant to pour down tomorrow so – well, there’s only so much baking to be done. However it has been a long week, with the water off most days while they laid new pipes, the electricity off one day (and bits of two others) for a new switchboard, and I got COVID again.
There will be a blog on my recent Enigmatic Variations puzzle later in the week. Upcoming puzzles outside the Friday Independent regular slots are a Church Times special on 28 June, a Times 15×15 on 2 July and a Pedro in the Times Quick slot on 5 July.
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Lovely – I really enjoyed reading that. Beautifully put together – poetically articulate as well as interesting and, though my opinion is of little matter, I concur with your view
Man, I’m really sorry about the Covid – but at least it’s now going and not coming (the latter would be worse!)
Take it easy. Take good care of yourself. There’s nothing worth sweating about – you’re likely doing enough of that already!
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