Table Of Contentishly Addictive
PUZZLE:
sting
iably Verbivorous
NUTCRACKERS
N w TC RA KE RS
U *
Devilishly Addictive Mind Twisters
for the Insatiably Verbivorous
BY
Jesse Green Meg Wolitzer
AND
GROVE WEIDENFELD
NEW YORK
Copyright © 1991 by Jesse Green and Meg Wolitzer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form, by any means, including
mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by Grove Weidenfeld
A division of Grove Press, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, New York 10003-4793
Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd.
ISBN 0-8021-3258-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
Designed by Helen Barrow
First Edition 1991
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
to
Allen T Cohn Jr.,
H.N. Lancelot Jr.,
and
Big Earl . .. real big
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Abundance 9
INSTRUCTIONS: Breaking the Code 15
MISSING PERSONS 29
CRYPTIC CROSSWORDS 57
LABYRINTHS 87
VERBATIMS 115
SOLUTIONS 143
INTRODUCTION
ABUNDANCE
IN A GOOD PUZZLE, which to us means a hard and elegant puzzle, there's a moment when all
the baffling elements suddenly align themselves, like the tumblers of a combination lock. The
solver encounters a particular pleasure no other pastime can match: a moment of blossom and
perverse intellectual joy. In our Nutcrackers, we try to lead you to that experience-and keep
you away from it as long as possible. Most of these puzzles were, after all, created for a
magazine called 7 Days.
It had not been our intention to go professional. Previously we had written puzzles only
for birthdays, traveling, illnesses, and such. The puzzles were complicated, and the clues
within them arcane in the extreme. Many of them referred to such major figures in our
peculiar pantheon as Susan Sontag, the Carvel ice-cream guy, Mary Tyler Moore, and Marcel
Proust. It would have been impossible for anyone else to solve them-but that was their aim
and glory.
Even earlier, in our separate suburban childhoods, we had become intoxicated with
words-not just their literal meanings as offered up in books, but their unreliability and
magic. In one of her memoirs, the poet Elizabeth Bishop remembers herself as a child looking
on while her relatives played a card game they called peanockle. At the same time, in her
reading, she discovered a different card game, this one pronounced-or so she surmised from
the peculiar spelling-pinnotchly. It wasn't until many years later that she discovered these
two games were actually one: pinochle. How could English do that?
We've wondered that all our lives. Like Elizabeth Bishop, we waited many years for our
first misapprehensions of the language to be reconciled-a reconciliation achieved at the cost
of some disillusion. We actually preferred to think that congested traffic on the expressway was
bumpita-bumpa, that the first man and woman were named Odd and Even. Perhaps it
comforted us to transform the cruel rat race we always heard news of into a playful, domestic
doggy-dog world.
But English, we all too quickly discovered, was not a fully domesticated beast. It could
delight and then disturb. Skin milk-how disgusting! Haste makes waste-how dirty! The
object of Hindu reincarnation? Minerva. But why Minerva? What had she done?
Naturally, it was not long before the phonemic glue that held all words together began to
dissolve. Cinema, spelled out in foot-high letters atop a local movie marquee, cruelly-it must
10
have been a marquee de Sade-insisted on making itself anemic. Later, like a prodigal son,
iceman would cometh to rejoin the anagrammatic clan.
Cold? Bloodless? Yes, but irresistible. Unbidden, words began to fall apart around us: the
names of loved ones, the names of soap. Sometimes the results would be felicitous flowerings
of language; sometimes just fleurs du mal. A bridge needs structural reinforcement? Well, that
makes sense: a rein for cement. But does it help the world to know that histrionics is an anagram
of trichinosis?O r apnea a version of paean? This kind of thing just gives you headaches-not
for nothing is migraine an anagram of imaginer. In any case, we had no choice, and such
verbal contortion has continued to occupy us, at least in part, from those days until these.
IMPROBABLY, we met as winners of Mademoiselle's guest-editor competition during the summer
of 1979. Despite much fanfare, our official responsibilities were vague; they seemed to involve
trying on jeans, participating in scent seminars, and living down the infamous example of
Sylvia Plath.
In the absence of any genuine occupation, we almost immediately discovered our mutual
taste for wordplay-a taste indulged at the expense of our hosts. Mademoiselle was quickly
perverted into a magazine for convalescent dowagers: Madame Was Ill (Hot Looks for Fall!).
Then came the magazine for stylish birds: Madame Oiseau. Next, an edition for wives of
Nobel laureates: Madame Wiesel. A classic folie a deux had begun. (Folie a deux? Exude a foil!)
Such nonsense earned us looks of bewilderment and disdain; we learned to keep our habit
private. By the time we finished college, wordplay was conducted largely in the dark. New to
New York and lonely, we spent most nights on opposite ends of the telephone, first watching
reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then lapsing into spasms of verbal madness. Guessing
games, anagrams, palindromes, puns: We played with words until the sun came up and finally
we were reduced to sleepy laughter over a candy for monkeys called Rhesus Peanut Butter
Cups.
Increasingly, the standard puzzles available to us in the Sunday papers seemed tame in
comparison to our nightly marathons. Once having memorized the fauna of the outback (emu,
koala), the suffixes for sugars (-ase, -ose), and the fact that "actress Merkel" is invariably Una,
what was the point? Solving such clues became more chore than pleasure, a busman's holiday.
What we really needed was a holiday abroad-for though crossword puzzles had been,
essentially, an American invention (the first appeared in the New York World in 1913), it was in
England that the form had flourished most inventively. And the rest of our wordplay seemed
vaguely un-American, too.
We became aficionados of the puzzles that appeared in British publications like the Listener,
the Guardian, and the Times of London. To our delight, we found that Harper's and the
Atlantic were putting out Americanized versions that were almost as challenging. And so when
we were asked to write puzzles of our own, we at least had models. But we also had doubts.
N U T C R A C K E R S: Introduction 11
For writers with perhaps overly serious intentions, how respectable an enterprise was it?
Wordplay in private was one thing, but wordplay in print: Was it not like choosing Clown
College over Cambridge? We were greatly appeased to recall that even so unimpeachable a
figure as Stephen Sondheim had written puzzles for a while (and worse, a television show)
without evident embarrassment or hindrance to his career. And so we began to develop a
defense of wordplay, if not to edify solvers, at least to edify ourselves.
Wordplay stands in the same relationship to the attempted perfection of language as shamans
and their mad rituals do to religion. (The medieval Jewish Kabbalists even went so far as to base
their interpretations of scripture on anagrams, puns, acronyms, and the like.) A good pun
breaks through the imperturbable facade of speech and shocks us into an awareness of the
mystery of language. It is wilder than we think, and wiser.
Not to say wordplay is religion-though it has its fanatics and apostates. No, it is just a
pastime, albeit a pastime with something to teach. In a lecture delivered before the Academy of
American Poets, James Merrill makes a reluctant case for what is evidently a guilty pleasure.
"We speak wistfully of sounding the depths of the language," he says, "but language has its
shallows too, and we can drown in those just as easily as in the raptures of the former." As an
example he cites a London Times crossword that offered this definition for a nine-letter word: "A
kind of cakewalk? Plenty of it!"
Merrill solves the riddle at once-the answer is abundance-but the novice may not
understand why he's right. Only when the word is allowed to fracture will the logic become
clear: The cakewalk in question is really a bun dance. (See "Breaking the Code" on page 15 for
a step-by-step guide to solving cryptic clues.)
"Now this is at best the kindergarten of language, " Merrill concludes. "Still, it has the virtue
of training us, once we grow up, to keep in mind the oddity of a given word."
Merrill should know: His poetry is filled with dazzling wordplay. In one poem, a painted
Japanese screen is described as casting "swirls before pine." This is a spoonerism put to
wonderful use; perhaps those London Times puzzles honed his adult ear as much as Pope and
Tennyson had done in his youth. In any case, the solving must have been fun or he would not
have remembered it. We decided that if puzzles could be pleasurable and challenging, and
even instructive every now and then, that was enough of a justification for us.
AND so we accepted the assignment, determined to offer-as much as the grueling weekly
schedule would allow-a variety of puzzles to entertain and exercise the mind. We began to
think of them as mental machines-Nautilus equipment for the brain-with which bright
people could work out muscles they didn't know they had. It seemed to us there were practical,
albeit indirect, benefits. A problem studied conventionally for hours (whether it be intellectual,
mechanical, or emotional) is often best solved by the quick application of unexpected
insight-but insight cannot be bottled. It's a habit of mind that must be trained. In our
12
experience, it develops most readily from the unlikeliest sources: a tough game of chess, a witty
conversation, a moment of urgency. We aimed to create puzzles that would provide painless
challenges like these.
We were not always successful. One Nutcracker variety was hounded ignominiously from
the pages of 7 Days after months of reader outrage. Other puzzles prompted furious phone calls
and, in one case, an obscene, if encoded, imprecation. And an April Fool's cryptic (whose
clues looked almost normal but led to no possible answers) resulted in actual threats against our
persons.
Luckily, we were usually able to be both challenging and fair: perfect kindergarten
teachers. Most of the puzzles flew by without incident in their weekly rotation. Somewhere
between the sadomasochistic rigor of the British cryptics and the flabby dullness of their
American cousins, we located our own style. If there was a choice to be made between
perfection of form and cleverness of content (as there usually was) we invariably opted for the
latter. Symmetry thus went by the wayside-grounds for excommunication, to the English.
But the puzzles were fun. And now, in this collection, we're glad to preserve some of the best,
plus several that are brand-new or substantially reworked.
You'll find four kinds of Nutcrackers in the pages that follow; each resembles a kind of
puzzle you may have seen before but works a maddening twist on the pattern. Missing Persons
puzzles, for instance, take traditional, laborious word-search puzzles and trick them out with
cryptic clues and a hidden theme. They are an excellent introduction to the cryptic technique
employed in Cryptic Crosswords, which resemble typical Sunday puzzles only to the degree
that Maseratis resemble Fords. Labyrinths, which follow, combine elements of mazes, riddles,
and standard crosswords to create brain twisters not quite like any of their ingredients. And
Verbatims reconfigure standard double-acrostics with puns and quotations of more than
mechanical interest.
Each type of puzzle is explained in a brief introduction, but don't expect to understand
exactly what you're doing until you've tried a few Even then, we change the patterns to keep
you on your toes. You do have two advantages over 7 Days readers, however. First, each puzzle
is graded: One acorn means it's moderately hard, two means it's difficult, three means it's a
really tough nut to crack. And another advantage you have is that you don't have to wait seven
days for the solution. The puzzles are explained in detail at the back of the book. If you're stuck,
use these solutions to help you with individual clues before giving up on the entire puzzle. And
reading through a solution even after you've successfully completed a puzzle is one of the best
ways to prepare yourself for another round of torture.
As for us, the age of puzzles is-at least for the moment-over. Mary Tyler Moore no
longer graces the Manhattan airwaves, we're too old to stay up all night without feeling the
effects the next day, and one of us has a mewling baby in the house. We are, we reluctantly
conclude from the evidence, adults. And with the untimely demise of 7 Days, we let our
