Spoiler alert: Some of the answers to Sam Worley’s crossword puzzle (PDF) are discussed in this article. If you’re the type of person who worries about that sort of thing, you’re advised to do the puzzle first.
Farrar began her career as Margaret Petherbridge, later taking her married name from John Farrar, a founder of publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She was a secretary to an editor at the Sunday World, which in 1913 printed the world’s first crossword—the creation of an ex-Liverpudlian named Arthur Wynne, who conceived it initially as a diamond-shaped puzzle with no black squares. “Liverpool’s two greatest gifts to the world of popular culture are the Beatles and Arthur Wynne,” crossword constructor Stanley Newman wrote in his 2006 book Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid. The crossword’s form would change and so would its name. Wynne called his creation a “word cross”; the linguistic inversion is thought to have been in error.
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In 1931 the New Yorker speculated on another reason for crosswords’ popularity in a Talk of the Town piece. The occasion was the restaurant Huyler’s printing puzzles on paper doilies—”so that one may occupy one’s time pleasantly while taking refreshment.” The New Yorker surmised, “This is a direct result of prohibition. When wine and beer were the beverages at a public inn, there was no necessity to engage the mind in any exercise—one merely allowed it to expand and subtilize. Now the drink is frosted chocolate, and the mind creeps for shelter into its own gray crannies, aided by a crossword puzzle (down and across, down and across) to escape the larger stratospheres of thought.”
Among Farrar’s innovations was the introduction of the themed crossword, in which several entries are given over in the service of what she called an “inner-clue puzzle”—a bit of wordplay, a trick, a series of puns. She credited constructor Harold T. Bers with inventing the themed puzzle. An early example by Bers—possibly the first ever; sources differ on this point—was a puzzle entitled “Catalogue,” which had answers like CATBIRD SEAT, KITTY HAWK, and PUSSYFOOT.
In Crossworld, Marc Romano notes the layers of cultural specificity in the solution to a vague clue like “2002 upset,” which he found in a puzzle by wunderkind constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley, who in 2007 was accused by the Boston Globe of “making the New York Times crossword hip.” The answer, SUPER BOWL XXXVI, he notes, requires the solver to know that, first, “Superbowls are numbered with Roman numerals and, second, that the thirty-sixth was an underdog victory pulled off by the New England Patriots.” And that’s sports. Everyone knows about sports.
Margaret Farrar retired as the New York Times‘s puzzle editor in 1969 and was succeeded by Will Weng, who held the job until 1977. Of the four puzzle editors in the Times‘s history, Weng’s tenure was perhaps the least remarkable—he wasn’t a pioneer of the form like Farrar was, and he didn’t refine and popularize it to the extent of the current editor, Will Shortz. Certainly he didn’t have the chilling effect of his immediate successor, Eugene Maleska, a fearsome former Latin teacher. Maleska was a bane. His tenure was characterized by an overreliance on what cruciverbalists call “crosswordese,” needlessly abstruse clues and answers that hinder solution of the puzzle more than they help. In Cruciverbalism, Stanley Newman supplies an example. Maleska would’ve looked favorably, he thinks, on “Fibre of the gomuti palm,” the trickiest clue in Arthur Wynne’s inaugural word cross. In the post-Maleska era the clue might have been different: “Homer Simpson exclamation.” For both clues the answer is DOH.
Updated references notwithstanding, Times readers—it’s well known—will accept only so much cultural degradation. In 2006 assistant managing editor Allan Siegal reported receiving “dozens of angry messages from readers, as well as complaints from colleagues on the staff” about the answer SCUMBAG, which had appeared recently clued as “Scoundrel.” The complainants pointed out that “scumbag” is actually an arcane term for “condom.” In an article about the flap, Slate pointed out that when a congressman called Bill Clinton a “scumbag” in 1998, the paper had refused to print the term—instead it reported on the “use of a vulgarity for a condom to describe the President.” Will Shortz said that the possibility of controversy had “never crossed [his] mind” and that he wouldn’t use the word again.
Here’s the puzzle.
Here’s the solution.
