As for the words that find their way into cross words, strange as it may seem with the whole of the dictionary to choose from, the same old favorites have a way of recurring ceaselessly. Of course, all the two letter words are overworked, and many have to compromise on abbreviations. Our sole objection to abbreviations is that they cannot be defined without practically telling what they are. Parts of the verb “to be”; prepositions; the Egyptian Sun God, Ra; Pi, em, ma, pa, i.e., e.g., so, to, go, do, are to be found in almost every cross word puzzle, and the solver gets heartily tired of them. So the better patterns avoid these two word spaces. The three letters words contain some old favorites, too. Eel, emu and gnu are among the most popular. It seems that almost nine-tenths of the puzzles we look at have a “snake-like fish” wriggling in them somewhere. And who hasn’t found err, sin, and erg; cam, moa, tar; pal, ode, née, ace, e’er, o’er, sac; lee and lea; ape and pea; ego, ago and age; era and eon; Eli and spa; and all the notes of the scale from do to do. Truly, all these words are to the puzzler as buttons are to a shirt.
Among the longer words, the rule seems to hold that words [[17]]with alternating consonants and vowels can be used more frequently than others. It is evident that a word containing three consecutive consonants, for instance, may have to take, in the word just below it, three consecutive vowels—and who hasn’t heard the cross-word constructor asking plaintively for a seven-letter word beginning with e-a-o and ending with u? Among the much-used words, you’ll surely find opera, onus, tenor, estop, used, ameer, renal, depot, emit, cabal, item, sere, lunar, nacre, neve, apse and the rest.
F. Gregory Hartswick [[18]]
THE SCIENCE AND LORE OF CROSS WORD PUZZLES
Everyone knows the classic Riddle of the Sphinx: what is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon and on three in the evening? the answer being man, who goes on hands and knees in infancy, with bipedal locomotion in after years, and in old age with a cane.
The posing of such riddles was an important affair with ancient peoples. It was a tradition of the archaic Scandinavians, among whom it shows clear literary relations. Thus, the riddle—what is the name of the horse that flies with upright wings across the sea, the answer being ship—becomes the metaphor, of a type common in the Sagas—the upright-winged horse of the sea.
Old forms of writing take on puzzle forms. In the Maya hieroglyphics of Central America is found an element similar to the mechanism of the rebus. It is as though the symbol meaning “hair” in juxtaposition with the one meaning “ring,” might mean “hair and ring” or it might mean herring. This makes the decipherment of the Maya writing so very difficult for modern scholars. The old fashioned charade has rebus-like elements. Cryptography, of course, must have begun in the earliest times when a literate man had a secret message to convey. The most recondite systems of hidden writing have been devised both for practical use and literary fantasy, remembering only Poe’s ingenious speculations. Much of [[19]]the “Baconian Theory” has revolved around supposed cryptography in Shakespeare.
Ancient and medieval folk were much given to anagrams; that is, to phrases of related meanings and made up of the same letters—as the masterpiece, “They see,” answer “The eyes,” or “Honor est a Nilo,” answer “Horatio Nelson.” Into theological controversy came such damnations as this: The Calvinistic opponents of Jacobus Arminius rearranged the letters of his name to spell, “vani orbis amicus,”—“friend of the false world.”
A recent “Baconian” argument based itself on an anagrammatical treatment of the long dedication of the sonnets. The author rearranged the letters of the dedication to form a statement that it was Lord Bacon who had written the verse. An experienced puzzler might object that he could rearrange the numerous letters to spell out a statement of almost anything, that he would rearrange the letters that make up Aristotle’s Poetics into a treatise proving that when the Democrats are in office hard times come. Similar to the anagram in principle is the transposition, in which you fill blanks in a text with words that are made up of the same letters; for instance, angered, enraged, derange.