I can stop doing cryptic crosswords any time I want to. I just don't happen to want to right now.
In Fall 2009, my wife finally succeeded in her long attempts to get me to start doing crosswords. As a child, I once filled out a newspaper crossword that advertised a $100 prize and sent it in, confident in my newfound wealth. I was bitterly disappointed when the next week's paper came out with no mention of the crossword having been solved, and indeed no money arrived. I decided that crossword authors were capricious and gave up on the genre.
My wife's help was really important. I learned about "crossword words;" she would look at a clue and give me a word that I'd never heard. I would blink and ask her what it meant, and she'd just say "I don't know; it's a crossword word." I learned that any clue in four letters that references a dog in a movie is about 85% likely to be Asta (from the Thin Man movies); 10% likely to be Toto (I don't think we're in Kansas anymore), and 5% something else, and if you have only one crosser in the third letter you just can't fill it in until you get one more crosser, though you can guess at Asta and see if it helps you with any of the crossers. I learned, also, that you are expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Broadway, the silver screen, and popular music; including the winner, runner-up, and second runner-up for every award ever given in any entertainment venue. Blah. I know next to nothing about popular entertainment culture.
After we had finished one book full of NYT dailies, I griped to a co-worker (Thanks, Andy!) about all the required esoterica, and he introduced me to the cryptic crossword, in which each clue is a word puzzle. He told me to get a book that had an introduction to how the word puzzles worked.
By sheer luck, I happened on what I believe is the absolute best book to start with: Fraser Simpson's 102 Cryptic Crosswords. Fraser Simpson, a Canadian math teacher, is one of the most stringent practitioners of a strict rule for making each word puzzle fair. He gave this newcomer to cryptics the ability to trust that the clues would make sense, so that I didn't throw it down in disgust.
I heartily recommend Simpson's work for getting started. After his "102" (all of which he constructed), I would suggest 101 Cryptic Crosswords: From the New Yorker which he edited. The style isn't quite as consistent, since he's the editor, not the sole constructor. Getting used to the different styles is an excellent way to launching into more cryptic crosswords.
From there, there are really two ways to go. There are two basic schools of thought in cryptics. One tries to stick fairly strictly to the rules of fairness set out by "Ximenes" (Derrick Somerset Macnutt), and the other is rather looser. In the stricter school, if the solver has to understand that you are using a word with an invented meaning or as a pun, the constructor (or "setter") is expected to tell the solver (normally with a question mark). In the looser school, you are just expected to figure out that (for example) a "flower" might be a river (because it flows) or a "banker" might be a river (because it, um, has banks), so that "italian banker" would "obviously" clue "po". In practice, there are perhaps a few hundred or few thousand of these odd constructions that solvers just memorize, as an esoteric jargon. In my opinion, this detracts from the beauty of the puzzles while making them less accessible, and is a concession to setters who have trouble coming up with better clues.
If this has piqued your interest, I strongly recommend the two Fraser Simpson collections, and then after that, there are several possibilities:
posted at: 21:30 | path: /words | permanent link to this entry
My father, an internist, has been self-publishing a short collection of stories on death and dying called Kind Farewells; each tells a story from his medical practice about a death that touched him, and others, deeply. So far, he has listed the book on lulu.com in hardcover, softcover, and PDF download formats. Recently, he decided that he wanted to offer it in various e-book formats as well.
This shouldn't be hard. He wrote the book in OpenOffice; the two most common ebook formats (epub and mobi) are both collections of HTML files; OpenOffice is able to export to HTML; and the Calibre tool is freely available to convert into many formats, including epub and mobi. So this should be a matter of choosing whether to export the HTML as a single file or as one file per chapter, converting it in Calibre, reviewing the converted content, and posting the file to Amazon's Digital Text Platform to make it available on the Kindle, Barnes and Noble's PubIt! to make it available for the Nook, and any other e-bookstores that are easy to use and allow individuals to publish books.
He asked for some help.
In practice, our biggest difficulty was OpenOffice.org HTML output formatting. We encountered two kinds of problems. The first was a simple bug; after the closing </html> tag, OpenOffice appended a few lines of seemly-random text from within the file. The second was that the conversion was clearly intended to preserve as many WYSIWYG elements as possible, which clashed badly with the constraints of ebook displays.
I ended up using the Python lxml module to write a short script which I made available on bitbucket to clean up OpenOffice.org HTML output for use in an e-book. I'm not intending to do active long-term maintenance of the script, so I encourage anyone who needs to modify it to fork it on bitbucket. If you use the "fork" button on bitbucket, the fork will show up on the main page for other people to see.
When I run the script, in order to make sure that the changes are only to the styling and do not modify the text of the book, I compare the output of lynx -dump before and after processing using diff -u. Since lynx does not honor CSS (as far as I know), my CSS changes have no impact on the output, and therefore bugs in my conversion script stood out as differences in the output from lynx.
The script isn't particularly quick; I intentionally wrote it to use XPath and multiple passes to make it easy to understand, edit, and modify.
The end result: While Barnes and Noble has taken days and still has not made Kind Farewells available in the NOOKstore, it showed up in less than a day on Amazon
posted at: 11:13 | path: /words | permanent link to this entry
My favorite part of The Atlantic is generally the Word Fugitives section of Barbara Wallraff's In a Word. There are always several well-considered, generally balanced, and certainly thought-provoking articles in The Atlantic, but for sheer linguistic fun I have to read the last page first.
The July/August Word Fugitives feature had a request:
And Curtis L. Brown, of Neenah, Wis., writes, “Please help me find an appropriate word for the aversion of many persons (young or old) to revealing their true age.”
I immediately googled “annumadversion” thinking that it was such an obvious coinage that someone else on the internet must have used it, but other than a helpful suggestion that perhaps I meant to “...search for: animadversion,” google was silent.
Hardly daring to hope that I could be the first to think of this coinage, I quickly submitted my answer to The Atlantic's web site. I felt some faint hope for a mention, and was impatient to discover which truly great coinage would cop "top honors" in a later issue.
Today, I picked up the November 2008 issue, and, as usual, I flipped to the back to read my favorite feature. In a Word started with a rehash of the familiar (and I thought discredited) suggestion that the “average college graduate is familiar with about 75,000 words” and ended up quoting Strunk and White: “Avoid fancy words.”
Moving on to Word Fugitives, I discovered that most of the suggestions were funny but snarky: those shy of revealing their age are “egostatistical” “chronic liars” who commit “cosmetic perjury”. Imagine my delight as I read:
But we wanted a word for the tendency—the aversion. Michael K. Johnson, of Apex, N.C., takes top honors for his fancy but refreshingly nonjudgmental coinage annumadversion.
That made my day.
posted at: 20:59 | path: /words | permanent link to this entry
A Christmas gift some years ago of The Dream Hunters introduced me to Neil Gaiman's work. As an amateur of folk tales, I was entranced and delighted by the beauty and craft of The Dream Hunters, and then started reading earlier works in the Sandman series; my introduction to the graphic novel. Neverwhere and Stardust next captured my attention, followed quickly by most of the rest of Gaiman's books.
In my second and third readings of Stardust, I grew conscious of one of the characteristics of Gaiman's works that I find deeply satisfying: What I first saw as "loose threads" were actually precisely woven through the text.
For many authors, it appears to me that internal structural integrity is achieved in a tradeoff against narrative flow; or, more often, that narrative flow is achieved by ruthlessly discarding internal structural integrity. Speaking as an engineer, this is a reasonable tradeoff, since most readers seem not to care about structural integrity. But internal inconsistencies drive me up the wall even when perpetrated by my favorite authors. (I have read — and own and love — dozens of C. S. Lewis's books, but try piecing together the chronology of Narnia!)
Gaiman is in a delightful but rare class of writers who have the means and inclination to combine compelling narrative with extraordinary structural integrity. I consider Dorthy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Rudyard Kipling well-known exemplars. Each time I re-read most of their published works, I generally notice additional internal consistency, rather than become annoyed by discovering small inconsistencies. This adds delight to re-reading, and helps me slow down while I read, increasing my joy in reading. A virtuous cycle.
Imagine, then, my delight to receive a copy of Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I paid almost no attention to the title, as usual. I dove in and read the whole book, rudely ignoring everyone around me for hours. As I finished it, I took a deep breath of satisfaction, leaned back in my seat, and said to myself, "Wow. The Jungle Book, set in a graveyard... Oh." I am a little slow on the uptake, I guess.
Like several of Gaiman's other works, you probably won't like it if you are squeamish. There is Death, and Blood, and Violence, and even War. It differs from prime time television news in three ways: it involves magic, it tells of creatures that are literally rather than figuratively inhuman, and it is well worth your time.
Several readers of advanced copies have complained that The Graveyard Book is episodic; almost a collection of short stories. That complaint misses the point in several respects. The first is that Gaiman is a master of the short story; a few words tell a long story. The second is that this story is particularly well-suited to this presentation. It is short enough not to scare away a (say) middle school reader — good! If you want the story to last longer, read slower! True to form, Gaiman's narrative and construction reward careful reading. Finally, this book, in this form, is an homage to another great work worth re-reading, and worth reading out loud.
posted at: 23:03 | path: /words | permanent link to this entry