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 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.

Of ancient glory, too, is the palindrome, which is properly not a puzzle at all, but an ingenuity. A palindrome reads the same backward and forward, as in the familiar “Madam, I’m Adam,” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” Perhaps the most charming of antique palindromes is the Roman legal maxim, “Si nummi immunis,”—“if you pay you go free.”

But perhaps the most fascinating of all word puzzles are the types in which words are to be guessed from definitions. There is the well-known acrostic, where with definitions as clues you arrive at a set of words of which the initial letters, or finals or second letters or third, as may have been determined, will spell another or other words. During the struggle for Italian freedom an acrostic was seen in the shibboleth, Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia, giving the name of the composer, Verdi. Most august of all is the fish symbol for Christ, which was held in much mystic veneration in the early Christian centuries. The Greek word for fish, Ichthys (Ιχθυς) was seen to be composed of the first letters of the sacred phrase, Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σῷτήρ), meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

It is the feature of determining words from definitions that has made “word forms” the most popular genus of puzzle. A word form is a set of words arranged one under the other so that their letters may be read across and down to give sensible readings, sometimes the same readings across and down and sometimes different readings. They may be of many geometric configurations, as square, pyramid, octagon, etc. Their origin is lost in the mists of time.

Word forms, especially squares, have a considerable following of very skillful adepts, most of them members of the National Puzzlers’ League, who construct and solve them with the same sort of devotion that a chess player demonstrates toward chess. Among such the forms take the most learned guise and consist of the most unusual sort of words. With the adepts any word that has ever been printed in an English book is allowable, and thus there is a great selection of exotic words in various spellings from old gazetteers, books of travel, etc. The adept delights in words that no one has ever heard of before. Here are several examples of recondite ingenuities.

By Mentor, in The Enigma

M A L E G A G E S

A D E N O C E L E

L E U C A E M I C

E N C O R T I N E

G O A R L I N G S

A C E T I F I E S

G E M I N I A N I

E L I N G E N I O

S E C E S S I O N

By Gemini, in The Enigma

V

R E S

I O N S

I N S E R T S

R O S E T R E E S

V E N E T I A N R E D

S E R R A T I O N

S T E N I O N

S E R O N

S E N

D

By Neophyte, in the Sunday Magazine, New York World

Z I K R H O O D

I X I A O L L A

K I W I O L I D

R A I D Y A D A D O

Y U G A

A G N I

L E W D A I S U S U

E R I A U N I T

W I L L S I V A

D A L I U T A S

By Alec Sander, in The Enigma

T

C A L

K A R A T

R A S E T E S

B A L A N I S M S

C O M M U T A T I N G

C O N T A B U L A T I O N

G A S T E R O L I C H E N E S

P E N T A G O N A S T E R I D A E

The great public following goes to the Cross Word Puzzle, which is an expanded word form in which, commonly, only dictionary words are allowed. It is this simplicity of words, together with its larger and more elaborate construction, that makes it irresistible to the casual puzzler. A cross word square, or other geometric figure, is a logical modern development of the ancient word square. The insertion of black spaces permits it to be made of any size and gives an interesting variety of inner construction.

The cross word puzzle began its career only a few decades back. It was run for many years in the Sunday Magazine of the New York World and has held a considerable and steady group of followers. Recently it has come into a sudden great vogue and is being printed by many newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Cross word puzzles are now published for the first time in book form.

Prosper Buranelli

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