Switching Crossword Blog Camps
June 22, 2012I’ve been doing The New York Times crossword puzzle for about ten years and have slowly made my way from being able to complete the easy Monday and Tuesday puzzles to having an 80% completion rate for Fridays and a respectable 60% completion rate for the brain-dizzying Saturday puzzle. (I don’t do the main Sunday puzzle because it is too big for a day I like to devote to my family, but I am a fan of the Second Sunday puzzles, especially the Diagramless crossword puzzles.)
About a year ago, I switched to a digital subscription of the Times and discovered Wordplay, a blog devoted to the puzzle. At first, I was utterly delighted. It can be lonely business doing the puzzle in Marseille because there is nobody to snark to when you dislike a clue or celebrate with when you conquer an especially difficult rebus. So, I dove into the blog community and became a semi-regular commenter.
But then I began to notice something. People on Wordplay were incredibly … friendly. And supportive. Which meant that when I wanted to vent about an inaccurate clue or nit-pick the use of a word, it felt awkward. In fact, it was astonishingly difficult for a critical examination of the puzzle to get traction; any expressed doubt about the puzzle’s quality was received about as well as booing a kid’s soliloquy at the annual grade school Christmas pageant.
My disillusionment with Wordplay became unbearable earlier this month. The puzzle for Wednesday, June 6 crossed the following words: NONCE [Clue: Present occasion] with MALESEX [Clue: What the Mars symbol symbolizes]. Knowing that NONCE was also slang for child molester, I found this to be rather macabre and thought the puzzle constructor was being either lazy or subversive. But when I posted these thoughts on the Wordplay blog, it felt like I had just farted in church: Not only was it considered unpleasant to draw attention to such a connection, I felt like I suffered some moral shortcoming for even noticing the cross. Nobody was willing to admit that purely from a lexical perspective, it was a rather bizarre placement of words. In fact, one regular commenter even implied that puzzle constructors shouldn’t have to know all the meanings of all the words they use!
This is when I realized there are two types of New York Times crossword solvers. Friendly people who see each puzzle as a fun challenge and like to applaud the constructors and cheer the efforts of other solvers; and a more critical group that considers the New York Times crossword the apex of the American crossword puzzle culture and expects a high level of lexical creativity and accuracy from the constructor. Wordplay is clearly for the former group; and I am clearly a member of the latter.
So, I went out in search of a new crossword community and I found a masterful crossword blog called Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle. The author can be cynical and biting and the comments forum is inhabited by a slew of reputable constructors and astute solvers. As serendipity had it, I found the blog on a day one of the worst puzzles in recent memory ran – a constructor used ‘A River Runs Through It’ as the theme but kept spelling out the word ‘RIVER’ over and over again so it was a boring and redundant fill. At Wordplay, they fell over themselves praising the puzzle. Rex Parker? Allow me to quote:
“I’m just writing the same 5-letter word into the grid, over and over??? This is terrible on so many levels. Dull, repetitive … pointless. Just pointless.”
It was an epiphany. I had found a like-minded solver and I actually welled up with emotion. What’s more, reading this objective analysis of the puzzle, I suddenly realized that Wordplay was nothing more than propaganda. The curator of the blog, Deb Amlen, is paid by the New York Times and the blog’s most forceful commenter, Martin, actually vets puzzles for the crossword editor before they go into the newspaper. Looking for true and critical puzzle commentary in Wordplay was akin to looking for true and critical political commentary in Pravda at the height of the Soviet regime.
Believe it or not, I was so moved I wrote a maudlin letter of gratitude on the Rex Parker blog and then used PayPal to offer an immediate donation to the cause. To my great pleasure, I was greeted with warmth and compassion by other solvers who had fled the saccharin ways of Wordplay. To sample but one:
“@Jeremy: Welcome to Rexworld! I had commented on the various NY Times blogs, including Wordplay, for 15 years until Jim Horne left as moderator and the tenor of the blog seemed to revert to nothing but “sweetness and light”. Contrary views were tacitly frowned upon as unseemly by the participants, (who, frustratingly post their oh, so clever musings over and over and over, ad nauseum), and it became uncomfortable to write critically and seem the skunk at the picnic. So, desperation drove me to try posting on this blog and I’ve never looked back. No regrets! Welcome to a kindred solver.”
Yes, at long last, I had found my true home.
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