Crosswords episode, perhaps?

Crossword puzzles have an interesting history and are a lot of fun to do. Dive in today to learn about Chuck's latest obsession.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's shuck and
this is Stuff you Should Know for one seven letters.

(00:23):
I'm really excited about this one because you and I
chatted recently, I think, probably on our super secret trip,
our research trip out west, about my new crossword passion,
which started I don't know sometime in twenty twenty two,
where I started dabbling in the New York Times Crossword

(00:44):
for the first time, doing Monday Tuesday ish. I would
try Wednesdays, and then I was like, I wouldn't even
try anything past that because I knew they got progressively harder,
and I wasn't, you know, I was just sort of
learning the language of crosswords, which is a thing we'll
talk about, yeah, And then I was like, you know what,
I'm gonna try these other ones, and before you know it,

(01:04):
I'm doing all seven days. Oh really like and finishing
them with my little cheats, which we'll talk about as well.
Oh that's pretty cool, man. Saturday's too, huh. Saturday's too.
And I love doing it so so much. It has
really added a lot of like happiness in my life.
I really really enjoy it. Man, do some crosswords. Take

(01:27):
a good nap, drink some tomorrow. You got to figure
it out. It's all coming up, chuck. So the New
York Times, he just said, it's all coming up, Chuck.
The New York Times is probably the most at least iconic,
if not well known, in the United States, at least
crossword puzzle in the whole country. Sure. One thing I
didn't know, Olivia helps us with this is that The

(01:48):
New York Times was actually the last metropolitan newspaper by
far to start running their own crossword puzzle. Yeah, because
for a good twenty year the New York Times just
looked down. It's knows that crosswords is a brainless fad
that would surely and ever any day now, and it

(02:10):
just never didn't. They finally caved, and then you know,
sixty eighty years later, something like that sing about eighty
years Wow, that's crazy. Um, it's now like the number
one crossword puzzle of all time ever the paper of record. Yeah,
so should we talk about the inventor of the word

(02:32):
cross Yeah, that's what it was called at first. His
name was he was a brit and he was an immigrant. Well,
he was a British immigrant. What does that mean? He
was an immigrant to the United States from Great Britain,
from Liverpool to be specific. All right, I get it now.
His name is Arthur Wynn, with two ends and one

(02:53):
y and any in a W. And he there were
some we didn't go over the prehistory of crosswords, but
there had been sort of crossword like word puzzles for
hundreds and thousands of years in some cases. And when
was probably pretty familiar with these, and he managed what

(03:13):
was called the Fun section of New York World that
had puzzles and jokes and things like that. And then
finally in nineteen thirteen, he said, in our Christmas edition
this year, I've created a puzzle called a word cross
that was shaped like a diamond, had no blacked out squares,
and had you know, sort of crossword clues like we

(03:33):
would recognize them today. Yeah, I mean, it was essentially
a crossword. He just got the name wrong. He got
it the name swapped, well, he got it right. Who
got it wrong but ended up being right was an
illustrator who accidentally swapped those words. And it was cross
dash word capital C, capital W. Yeah, and that name

(03:54):
stuck in it eventually just they said, let's quit with
a little dash in the middle, and let's go ahead,
make it one word yep. And Wynn was like, hey,
this is actually starting to get kind of popular within
just a few months, and he went to the publishers
of the world and said, hey, we should probably patent this.
And the world said, do you know how much it

(04:15):
cost to patent something these days? One hundred dollars. Get
out of my office and did not ever patent the crossword.
And I think that was actually a really it was
a bad move on the world's part, but I think
it was really great for the world. The world, you know, yeah, yeah, totally.
That would be very strange if crosswords were patented. Yeah,
I don't think that they would be anywhere near as

(04:36):
prevalent as they are now. So in that sense, the
publishers of the world gave us all a pretty neat present,
and we are going to give you a pretty neat
present by introducing you to a woman named Margaret Petherbridge.
This was at the time Arthur Winn's secretary, and he said, hey,
you know, you're pretty sharp, why don't you take this

(04:57):
job over? And it turned out she had a real
knack for not only creating crosswords, but kind of codifying
what crosswords were and sort of the rules of crosswords.
She was the earliest one to sort of put in
place these rules like, hey, you should have a separate
list for a cross and for down, and you shouldn't

(05:19):
have any unchecked boxes, which is a square that's only
part of one word, like it should all tie together. Yeah,
and very early on, I think if she didn't add
the black squares, which are called blanks, the squares you
actually fill in, they're called lights, she helps standardize them
because very quickly they if you look at a crossroad.

(05:39):
I never knew this before until we started researching this.
If you look at all the blanks, the blacks, the squares,
they're symmetrical. If you look at the left side and
the right side, they're mirror images of one another. And
you can turn it on its side and the top
and the bottom or mirror images of one another. And
I was like, why, how does that help anything? And
apparently they just decided, I think, if it wasn't Margaret

(06:02):
Pether Bridget with somebody she was friends with early on,
that symmetry is just beautiful, so make it symmetrical. Well,
they're not always like that they are. I mean, I'm
looking at Today's and it's not symmetrical. No, I spent
so much time trying to find like something that undermined that,
and I didn't like. I was like, oh, it's it

(06:23):
is symmetrical. That's symmetrical. Holy cow, that's symmetrical. Did you
look at any crossword puzzles? I like, yes, I looked
at crossword puzzles. Apparently I didn't look at the one
from today, though. Well, Today's not. It has a great
deal of symmetry now that I'm looking at it, and
this is something I've never noticed. But for instance, I'm
looking at one which on the right side is an

(06:43):
L and on the other side it's an L. The
bottom square of that L. Okay, so it's it's not
quite symmetrical, but it is kind of symmetrical in some parts.
I'm so sick of this stupid conversation. Are you looking
at the Today's yet? I can't. I don't have my

(07:03):
log in right now, so well, i'll take a screenshot.
I'll take your word for it. Man, all right. I'm
just so bummed though, because you thought that was like
the fact of the show. It was one of them
for sure, and now it turned out to be the
incorrect fact of the show. Well, let's move on to
the nineteen twenties, when a young company called Simon and
Schuster said, Richard Simond's aunt, I think, said, hey, these

(07:26):
crosswords a lot of fun. You guys should package He's
together in a book, because your book company. And so
they hired Margaret Petherbridge, codifier of rules and master crossword designer,
to put this book together. And she got a couple
of other editors from the world and said, all right,
let's get to work on this thing. It'll come out
in nineteen twenty four. It will come with a free

(07:47):
pencil and a racer, which is super cute. Yeah, and
sold one hundred and twenty three thousand copies in that
first year. Yeah, and that one rants or did so
well that they released a second edition, in a third edition,
all within the same year, and all combined, those three
editions by Christmas time had sold more than a quarter
of a million copies. For a fledgling publishing house. That's

(08:11):
a pretty big thing. But also they were very smart,
Simon and Schuster. They created the Amateur Crossword Puzzle League
of America to basically help promote crossword doing solving, I
guess is what they call it, in order to help
sell more books. And it worked. Actually, it became a
legitimate thing. They started standardizing crosswords as well. Oh hold on,

(08:34):
you know what I think I'm wrong? I just sent
you yes, yes, So it's a mirror image in a way.
It's it's not I thought everything would correspond directly across
from one another, but it also works diagonally, So I
see what you mean. It is symmetrical if you include

(08:57):
the diagonal. So if you look in the tipe bright corner,
the bottom left corner should be the mirror image of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's symmetrical. They're all symmetrical. It's insane because it makes
it so much harder. Oh man, I'm so glad we
solved that for you, because thank you, dumb when I
was dumb, No, you didn't make me feel dumb. Mind. Well,

(09:18):
I kept looking at it and I was like, how
can parts of it be symmetrical? That didn't make any sense, right,
But I was looking for like a direct flip. It's
hard to explain how my brain was looking at This
is a rare in show correction for one of us
against the other. Right. Um. So oh yeah. Back to
the Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America. Yes, um, which

(09:40):
sounds like they were all wearing capes while they totally
did um. But they had some rules like, um, no
part of the puzzle can be completely cut off from
the rest. Sure, so you can't use black squares to
just make an island of one grid. Um. You also
can't use tons of black squares. Uh. They actually is,
we'll see, make it easier to create a crossword because

(10:04):
using black squares breaks up the stuff so you don't
have to come up with So a typical I think
New York Times crossword is fifteen across and fifteen down,
So if you didn't use black squares, you would have
to come up with fifteen fifteen letter words. So no,
I guess thirty fifteen letter words, which would be really

(10:25):
really hard because they'd also all have to interact. So
they use these black squares to kind of break things
up and make it a little easier on themselves, to
shorten the letters and words and stuff like that. But
the Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America said, Okay, no
more than one sixth of all the squares can be
blacks can be the black squares, because after that you're

(10:45):
really just kind of making a lame crossword. Yeah, and
I want to take another stab at correcting you, Oh no,
or to maybe clear up when you say fifteen across
and fifteen downs, that's fifteen lines, not fifteen clues, right,
But there's also fifteen spaces right total I'm saying. And

(11:07):
if there weren't any blacked out blanks, you would have
a fifteen letter word across at the top, a fifteen
letter word below that, a fifteen letter word below that,
and then from up vertically there'd be that have to
make a note its owned fifteen letter word, and so
on and so forth. So yeah, it'd be fifteen across
in fifteen down, right. I just want to make sure

(11:28):
people knew you didn't mean fifteen across clues in fifteen
down clues. There's fifteen lines vertically, in fifteen lines horizontally,
and on each line there can be as many as
you know, four words, no, no, four clues, Okay, but
that's if you have black blank squares. If you didn't

(11:49):
have blank right, But if you didn't, you'd have to
come up with fifteen letter words, any of them that
all interactive with one another. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I get it. But it sounded are we really talking
about this, man, this is a brainbuster of an episode.
I wasn't expecting this when you were talking about it. Initially,
it sounded like you were saying, there were fifteen acrosses
in fifteen downs. Yes, if you didn't have black squares,

(12:14):
there would be right, but there, that's not a crossword,
right right, agreed. But the thing is is you could
keep adding more and more black squares to make it
easier on yourself, the puzzle constructor. And if you why,
because they're shorter words. Yeah, it makes shorter words. It
makes it easier to come up with words that interact
and intersect with one another. And I disagree. They said, well,

(12:38):
you should take it up with the crossword puzzle constructors
because they say it makes it easier. Oh really, Because
I've begun working on constructing my own, that's sort of
the giveaway. And I found that having a good long
word is a real benefit. Okay, yeah, it definitely can be.
But imagine having to come up with thirty fifteen letter
words that all interact with one another. That's not a

(13:01):
crossword though. That's my whole point. Okay, forget it. The
other thing, the other way to look at it, Chuck,
is that to show off crossword constructors use as few
blanks as possible. Yeah, so then get those longer words.
That's fine. Well, yes, we'll agree to that. Short words
you're challenging. I think you're thinking of a word search.

(13:21):
No I'm not. I know what I'm talking about. Will
Schwartz please come to our aid and settle this once
and for all. Oh well, ironically, I think we've been
saying the same thing, just in different ways. I think.
So Two, we need Jerry here to to interpret for us. Yeah,
Jerry's not here today. That's why we're fighting. Let's finish
this is as bad as our fights get. We should

(13:45):
finish this part, I think before we go on and
take a break. And that is when things got hot
in the crossword community. Was the nineteen twenties in the
United States, and it was a like a big d
such that there were people that came out and said, hey,
these cross It was sort of like these jazz cigarettes
are ruining our culture, Like these jazz puzzles are ruining

(14:10):
things because people are just spending all their time doing
crossword puzzles. Uh, there was and in the in the
UK there was in nineteen twenty four a headline from
the Tamworth Herald that said crossword puzzles it should be
a colon and enslaved America. And they were talking about
how like men are wasted, it was a sinful waste

(14:30):
of time, and that it was a fad that would vanish. Yeah,
that was the New York Times that called this sinful
waste of time. So yeah, there was a real like
if you were if you consider yourself an intellectual, you
definitely look down on crosswords in the twenties because it
was just such a huge popular pop culture sensation. Yeah,
there was a song that was called crossword Mama. You

(14:51):
puzzle me demand in parentheses, but Papa is going to
figure you out. It's like vaguely intimidating, it is it is.
So it was like it was a really big deal.
But um, yeah, as much as the New York Times
and some of the other um of the tongue clucking
set wished m crosswords didn't go anywhere. They just became
more and more popular and eventually they did catch on.

(15:13):
In Britain, Chuck, they have their own version called Cryptic Crosswords.
Did you see anything about that? Yeah? The Cryptics are
like the New York Times Crossword will have a handful
of clues that are sort of deal more and they're
more clever. There's more word word play, there's puns. They
try to throw you off track, and apparently these in

(15:35):
Britain are that's all they are. They are and they're
really tough. They have really different rules than American ones.
So one an example, I think whatsoever a clue. A
clue was artist's phone hacked by terrible woman and the
answer is Chagal who is an artist. But the reason

(15:55):
Chigal is the answer is because in the middle of
Chigal there's the word hag And if you take the
word hag out of chical, you have call, which references
a phone. Wow. Yeah, like my brain just melted out
of my ear a little bit. Yeah. My deal with
the New York Times is I I love a good
clever clue like that. That's that I can figure out. Yeah,

(16:19):
there's the best. I saw a friend American Crossroad. I
don't know who wrote it, but it was it brings
The clue was it brings out the child in you,
and the answer was labor. M that's good. That's the
that's sort of they have those routinely, Like, that's what
I'm talking about. That's a good example of a really good,
clever but gettable thing. You know, I really thought I

(16:42):
was going to get a better response out of you
than that for that one. Yeah, it's a great one.
It brings out a child in you, labor like you
just gave birth to a child. Yeah, but those are
there were two or three of those in almost every
puzzle I know that, but that one is particularly We
need to start this episode over all, right, let's think
of break and we'll go hatch this out. We'll be
right back, all right. So we mentioned that the New

(17:27):
York Times finally got their crossword puzzle years and years
after they were all the rage in the twenties. And
it was when we entered World War two. Enter once again.
Margaret Petherbridge, now Margaret Ferrar said, wrote a letter to
the New York Times, is you know what we're going
into war? It's impossible too, and this is a real quote.

(17:48):
You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword,
so like this, this is going to be a big
distraction for everyone during this tough time. And the New
York Times said, you know what, I think you're right,
and why don't we hire you to do it and
you can be our editor? And she said, I'd be
happy to do that for twenty seven years, right, man.
This was nineteen forty two, I think that they brought

(18:09):
her on board. And Margaret Petheridge Ferrar had been or
Petherbridge had been um a like involved in the crossword
world since the beginning, since they were invented, and so
who else would you bring on as the first editor
of the New York Times Crossword? Yeah? And she did
it for twenty seven years, like you said, which is

(18:30):
eclipsed in time only by the current crossword editor, Real Shortz,
who's been doing it for like, I think thirty something years,
thirty two maybe. But yet she had a really huge
impact on crosswords, and that's something I think a lot
of people overlook. The impact that crosswords have on society

(18:54):
and culture is really like under the radar, but it
is really significant because what you choose as words and
clues and the way that you put things has a
there's millions of people all experiencing that same that that
same puzzle, and so it's like you're planning seeds and

(19:15):
millions of people's heads, and those millions of people go
on to talk and interact and it has a really huge,
far reaching effect, way more than you'd think of, Especially
the New York Times crossword. Yeah, there's something that I
realized what there's is that, uh, And I was just
naive because I didn't know much about it and I
hadn't seen the documentary wordplay at that point. Have you
seen it yet? Yeah, it's great, but there's a real

(19:36):
community around it. And once I started doing it. Um.
I think I told you that Hodgeman and I were
talking on the phone about something else and the crossword
came up, and he had been doing it. He's he's
a big words guy, no surprise, and does play scrabble
with his wife and for years and years and decades,
and so he's long done the New York Times. And

(19:59):
I was like, oh cool, and we started talking about it,
and I was so new to it. I was super excited,
and I think that sort of rebbed his motor a
little bit because I was, you know, I was a
new guy that was like, thought it was the coolest
thing ever. And so we started texting a lot about it,
and then our friend Ben Harrison of the Greatest Gen Podcasts,
Ben does it. So all of a sudden, I've got

(20:21):
all these people like colleagues and other podcasters that we
like text each other hints or you know. John was like, man,
text me if you don't know a thing, and I
was like, well, I could just look it up, and
he said, text me. It's more fun. And I was like, right,
there's a community here, yeah, and about it. I can
just go lock myself in the basement with a candle
and look it up. And I wasn't saying I shouldn't

(20:43):
get in touch with you about it, but it's like,
why would I bug you about it? And he was like, no,
bug me. That's the whole point is it's like it
can be a social thing even though it's a generally
a solo pursuit. Absolutely, So Margaret for our kind of
like coming to our live podcast shows. Huh yeah. So
Margaret fer Our, she retired in I think nineteen sixty

(21:05):
nine and a guy named Will Wang took over. And
Will Wang um he had a huge impact on the
crossword as well. He had a great sense of humor
and so he got into that word play. Those puns
kind of like a diversions, like making you think it
was it's one thing when it's really another, the use
of a word that's got to be a will whanger.

(21:31):
He was replaced after eight years. He moved on and
by a guy named Eugene te Moleska, and he was
the editor from seventy seven to ninety three. And he's
the one that I think a lot of people our
age who don't like crosswords think of when they think
of how much they don't like crosswords, because he was

(21:51):
really being into opera, a former school superintendent, he knew Latin,
and he expected the crossword puzzlers, the solvers, I say,
to have the same like background in education and tastes
that he did. And a lot of people don't, you know,
like it's not like you have to hate opera, but
if you don't really like opera, you're probably not at

(22:12):
all into opera, you know what I mean. There's it's
not like I'm kind of into opera thing, you know
what I mean? And to expect everybody else to understand
the clue that that you know, wordplay about you know,
and some opera that it's not. I don't know. I
just get the impression that the approachability of it really

(22:32):
bottlenecked under Molaska. Yeah. And the one thing that John
and I agree on is like, and this is true
when we've designed our trivia games that we used to
do or pub trivia, is that the best clues in trivia,
we believe and in crosswords are ones that you can
probably kind of figure out and even if you don't
know the answer, and the worst ones are you know,

(22:54):
this person wrote this book or this opera, and you're like, well,
if you don't know it, you don't know it. It's
a lot more fun to try and test your brain
into seeing if you can kind of figure it out.
And eventually you'll do that by getting other letters that
intersect with that word, of course. But if if it's
just like I don't know, it's kind of lazy to me.
To me to be like, you know, just name this

(23:17):
person who start in this movie. Yeah, lazy is a
good way to put it. But on the other hand,
like the converse of it is like you just really
touched on an important thing of cross words, and that
they are approachable and they do something to your brain
that taps into a part of your mind and your
intellect that's not just wrote memory, that where you can

(23:40):
combine different things that don't seem to be at all combined,
and it just makes it a really like pleasurable thing.
A lot of people compare, especially the British version, crypto
crosswords to reading like a miniature murder mystery and when
you figure out who it was, it turns out you
were right, your suspect was the one who did it.
That that feeling of like I knew it. That same

(24:01):
thing can come from like every single clue almost of
a really well written crossword, and it's kind of the
same thing where there's this discovery and you you also
have that kind of rush of accomplishment for having figured
it out without just knowing a fact that you learned
in school. I think that was a really important point
you made. Yeah, but also it's not you can have

(24:23):
I wouldn't want to go all cryptic like a good
crossword total And it's has a mix of both because
it's also nice when you do know something and it's
you know this man let voices carry and you know
it's amy, you know what I mean? Did you get
that one? I did? It was pretty good. But would
you just made that one up? Wouldn't you have to?

(24:45):
It's good chuck, but think about it, you're gonna have
to fess up and make it two ends. Well. Sure,
so that's a huge giveaway too, but that's part of
the cheekiness of it. Yeah, no, I'm with you. But
sometimes it literally just says this person started and whatever. Movie. Right.
So there's one other one I want to give a

(25:06):
cryptic crossworth that just blows my char So that clue
is lineage and the answer is eagle. Can you figure
it out? Well, I mean I know it because you
this is something that I read. We'll pretend like you
just figured it out and share it. No, how about
you ask the audience, well, audience, do you know no? No,

(25:29):
Well I'll tell you. It turns out that lineage can
also be read as L in eg eage. Well, if
you put L in eage, you get eagle. Yeah, I
mean those are tough, man, That is really tough. You
have to be so thoroughly British to be like, yes,
I totally am tapping into this. Yeah, it's just it's

(25:51):
just a different way of doing it, but it's the
same thing, and I think it's neat that everybody's got
their own way. Yeah. My Actually, let me amend that
my least favorite clues and I will bail on a
puzzle altogether. If the theme and we'll talk about the
fact that they have themes in a minute, But if
the theme is it's just you have to misspell this
word in order for it to be right. I hate those. Yeah,

(26:14):
you're like, if it's not a duke is a hazard theme,
I don't want to have anything to do with that crossword.
Back to will Schartz in the timeline of editors, because
like you said, there's only been one, two, three, four, Yeah,
I mean it's a good gig that, like the least
tenard was what eight years, yeah, Will Wing. So it

(26:34):
seems like a job that people like because they keep
doing it forever. But Schwartz has been there for thirty years.
There was no full time staff there besides himself when
he came on, just a part time assistant, and he
changed that had somewhat of a staff. All of a
sudden he added the buyeline, which is a big deal.
When you go to your daily puzzle. You see who

(26:55):
wrote it and who constructed it, which is kind of cool.
And before that there was no biolin at all. And
then he said, you know what, we should also get
like clues that like talked about people of color and
talked about different types of cultures and more diversity overall.
I'll also add brand names, which is something they never

(27:16):
did before. Yeah, for sure, to just really kind of
opened it up. He definitely did. He also started publishing
from a lot of different people too, including teenagers. I
think up to the Shorts era, only I think like
sixteen teenagers had ever been published in the New York Times,
And since he's been there, I think it's like sixty

(27:38):
four now now that was six teenagers. Six teenagers. It's
even less than I thought before. Yeah, six, and then
during his tenure forty six. Wow, So I really cool.
Screwed the pooch on that one, but the gist was
still correct. One thing that is also correct is they
do get progressively harder, and I was sort of wrong

(28:02):
when I first started doing and I thought Sunday was
the hardest. They get more intellectually challenging Monday through Saturday,
and then Sunday's sort of like a midweek level, but
it's just larger. That's what I saw about one hundred
and forty clues. Usually, yeah, it's it's not lines. I know,
not lines. It's not what I meant. Here's let's do

(28:23):
this great example that Livia gave, because this is another
kind of fun head teaser, brain teaser. So the clue sandwich,
often given a twist, might be the Saturday clue for oreo,
whereas the Monday version might just be Nibisco sandwich cookie.
I saw that they start out easy on Monday and

(28:44):
then get increasingly harder day by day because they assumed
that the crossword solvers out there were still recuperating from
the weekend morning, and that they were getting sharper and
sharper as the days went on. And then you on Monday,
you get to just blaze through one. No, no, like
you're still hungover on Monday. So they made it easy
on you, That's what I'm saying. And you get to

(29:05):
blaze through it in ten minutes and feel good about
yourself again, right exactly, and then throw up from having
to focus on the little tiny print for an hour.
But just to explain in case you don't do them
at all, and you're like, I don't get the oreo thing.
Sandwich often given a twist. People often twist the oreo apart.
It is a cookie sandwich, and as Libya astutely points out,

(29:26):
that also satisfies what you see a lot in crosswords,
which is the short word with a lot of vowels,
like once a week, Enya the New Age artist. Enya
is a clue. She's never been She's been topical for
thirty something years because of her name. It's really funny,
and they're different ways of like describing the clue or whatever,

(29:50):
but it's it's very funny. It's always like this this
new ager or something like that, and so I see it,
there's Enya. Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing too that I
think you kind of referenced earliers. You know, you start
to get a feel for the language of cross words,
and sometimes some clues are virtually the same as others.
There's only so many ways you can describe ye, So yeah,
that'll start popping up, especially if it's a vowel heavy

(30:14):
heavy word. We should talk about themes a little bit
more though, right, sure, Well, they're themed. A lot of times,
not always, but it seems like out of the seven days,
I would say three or four of them are usually
themed at least, and that is when there would be
like it's usually like four or five of the clues

(30:36):
have a theme, and then there would be an additional
one that says blank blank blank is a clue and
that it will say or a great clue to the answers,
you know, four or seventeen, sixteen, and twenty four, So
it'll it'll be a clue plus an additional thing that
sort of helped describe what the theme might be. Like

(31:00):
the theme the answer might be doubles, and that is
also the theme of the other ones that you you know,
hopefully got by that point. One of the other things
I saw that make theme crosswords popular, especially among constructors,
is that the theme answers are usually multi lettered see
ten letters, and that's a big long string of consonants

(31:21):
and vowels that you can use to branch other words
off of the intersect with. So you'll have four or
five theme words. So you've got four or five ten
letter words right off the bat, but you don't have
to come up with thirty fifteen letter words. So it's
much more advantageous. Yeah, and like the example Olivia gave

(31:43):
of a theme, they're very This is very typical winner
of a preparing contest would be best sheller. And so
the theme ends up being adding an h in other
common terms to make it a different term. So, in
other words, instead of best seller, it's sheller. Another one
in that same theme would be Lothario's line in a

(32:04):
single spar pick up sticks instead of pick up sticks.
So themes like that I really enjoy. But the themes
I don't like, or like I said, when it's like
this is the word misspelled or something. Okay, thank gotcha. Okay,
I'm getting on my crossword soapbox a little. I say,

(32:24):
we take our second break and then come back and
talk about how people out there who are like I
like hearing about these crosswords. I'm gonna go try one.
Wait wait, wait, because we're about to inform you how
to solve them more efficiently, starting in just a minute
or two after this moment, So the New York Times

(33:06):
went so full bore into um, which is, by the way,
is not sexual, kind of like balls out into crosswords
that they actually have a crossword column, not just a crossword.
They have a columnist dedicated to writing about crosswords. Yeah,
her name's currently deb Amlin. Well that's probably always going

(33:28):
to be her name from now on, but I'm saying
the current columnists is named deb Amlin. Sure, and she's
at the New York Times, and she's got some tips
that she maintains that are they're pretty good if you
want to start out learning how to kind of basically
solve a crossword a little faster than you might have
on your own. Yeah, for sure. And by the way,

(33:48):
there are lots of fun blogs outside the New York
Times too that that write kind of funny takedowns of
the day's puzzle. Nice. But Amlin says to start by
scanning for an the answers you definitely know for sure, Right,
it's a good way to start. Yeah, take a guess sometimes,
but use your racer, of course, I do mind on

(34:09):
the app online version. And then once you get like
the intersecting words, more things will reveal themselves. So it's
fine to take a guess because you can go back
and redo the word once you've realized that you were wrong.
Another one she suggests is yours and Hodgeman's method working
with another person. Yeah, via text or in person can

(34:30):
be fun. Over the breakfast table. Sure, if you get stuck,
just take a break. You don't have to finish this thing.
It's not a competition, like you can walk away from
it and come back. And oftentimes you'll do that kind
of unconscious thinking, almost like sleeping on it without sleeping,
and these things that just seemed totally impenetrable will suddenly
seem clear to you with fresh eyes. That happens almost

(34:52):
every time I do that. It's it's And I told
Hodgeman that and he went, yeah, that's a documented phenomenon
that happens. Yeah. Another one is that it's and this
is very controversial, but everyone has their own way of
doing it. There's no right way of doing it. There
are some purists, I'm sure that do not cheat at all,
and if they don't finish it, I guess they just

(35:14):
don't finish it. I like to finish it. So here's
what I do. I will do all my acrosses first,
and then I'll do a check and it tells you
what you've gotten wrong. Then I do all the downs,
and then I do a check. Because I don't want
to spend it. I don't have a like hours and
hours a day to work on these things, and I

(35:34):
want to finish them, so, like, I don't want to
spend a lot of time trying to figure out something
and drive myself crazy if I've gotten the A cross
word wrong to begin with, because then you're just throwing
yourself off. So I do a check one check down,
one check across, And that's the only sort of cheats
I'll use most times. Unless I'm just really stuck at
the end and i can't get the last couple. Then

(35:55):
I'll cheat, and I'll be like, all right, you know,
because what you're doing is you're learning something. If you're
if you're stopping three quarters of the way through because
you like you refuse to cheat, then you might be
missing out and learning something cool. So or you know,
solve it your own way. If you want to be
a purist and just not finish it, that's fine too.
So um, I think that's great words of advice, Chuck. Yeah.

(36:17):
Some other ones I saw are so when you're looking
at the clue, the plurality of it. If the plurality
if the clue is plural rather than singular, the answer
has to be plural, So in that sense, if you
see something that has a plural clue, you can just
go ahead and add an S at the end right um.
Same with tense, so if if the clue is past tense,

(36:40):
you can add an eed right at the bottom of
them of the the answer um. And that's a great
way to fill up a couple of squares right off
the bat too. And as you fill in other ones,
say that are going across, and you're filling down answers
with s's and eds, that stuff's going to fill up
a lot faster and become clear. Yeah, we talked about

(37:01):
the language of cross words, which you just sort of
get more familiar with as you do them. Partner Whenever
you see the word partner in there, it's usually linking
words together. So the example that Livia gave was a
partner of live. The answer would be learned because you
usually here live and learn stuff like that one. They
also will abbreviate words, but they say that they're abbreviating it,

(37:25):
So like following the clue, it will be say abbr
period or for short or in brief, or they'll actually
put an abbreviation in the clue. So a clue of
elephant group, as in GRP, the answer a GOOP because
that's an abbreviation of Grand Old Party and the elephant

(37:45):
group is the abbreviated group GRP. Does that make sense, Yeah,
but not all abbreviations, like it's usually if it's something abbreviated,
that usually isn't like group was abbreviated. If you see oh,
good point, like what Libya put down is a great example.
If you see VIP, that doesn't necessarily mean that the
answer is going to be an abbreviation because VP is common. Yeah,

(38:08):
people don't typically abbreviate group. Right. You'll also very rarely
see the same word twice in a single crossword. Yeah,
it's it's considered bad form among crossword constructors. Constructors also
frequently give you fill in the blank clues as a gimme.
So there's a blank and then the second word or

(38:31):
something like that in a clue makes it probably pretty
easy to figure out based on the number of letters.
That's when you can start with. And then also I
saw that you should start at the bottom right because
the premises that constructors typically will start at the top
left and by the time they make it to the

(38:53):
bottom right, which is the end of the puzzle. They're
they're tired and they've stopped being quite as clever, so
you can figure out the clues in the bottom right easier. Yeah,
I'd start with one and one. That's how I do it. Okay, Uh,
there's some other fun ones, and I wish I would
have looked up an example. But one that you see
every single day is like, uh, word preceding, you know,

(39:15):
cat and basket and it'll be a word that you
often see linked up before cat in basket That isn't
one because I can't think of one. Play cat in
basket case, cat cat case in basket case. Okay, but
that would be uh not proceeding. But yeah, um, so
they'll do that a lot. Here's some things that I
didn't know, which now I'm going to be better at. Um. Well,

(39:37):
I did know this. If it's a question mark at
the end of the clue, that usually means is probably
a pun or some kind of wordplay, Like current events
is really current events, so tides because tides have currents,
it's an event. Yeah, then you're like, what's the fifth
letter for well, and a lot of times the obvious

(39:58):
answer that's wrong. We'll have the same. If they're really good,
they'll have the same number of letters. Right, So you're like,
it has to be news. It fits, yeah, exactly. But
the ones I did not know was that if it's
in a quote, then the answer is a synonym for
a spoken phrase. And I sort of knew it was
sort of like that, but I didn't know it was
always like that. And then if it's in brackets, and

(40:20):
I didn't know this at all. I never knew what
the brackets meant. The brackets usually mean that the answer
is nonverbal, right, like the example Olivia gives us, that's painful.
In brackets, the answer might be grimace. Right. I didn't
know the brackets one either. The thing I like about
the quotes one is it's intuitive, Like I didn't know

(40:42):
that that was a convention, but I know that I've
figured that out, you know, plenty of times doing cross
words to seeing those quotes. It just it's a really
great convention, I think. And then the heteronyms, these are
my favorite. These are the really clever ones where it's
something that can be pronounced in two different ways and
you're intuitively led down a path to believe it's one,

(41:04):
and it's really the other. Um. So, the example that
Livia found was kitchen drawer. So you're trying to think of, like,
what's kitchen drawer? What could it be? What could it be?
And the answer is a roma. So it's not kitchen drawer,
but a kitchen drawer, as in the aroma draws you
into the kitchen. It's such a great one. I know,
I love that stuff. Not as good as labor, but

(41:24):
still pretty good. Okay, so you said you're trying your
hand at constructing puzzles. How's it going. Well? I mean,
I've I've started the idea of trying. I'm trying to
find a partner, asked Hodgeman, and he sort of didn't
say anything back. So I think that was a soft bass. Yeah.
Ben seemed a little more into it. And I wanted
to see if I could get stuff. You should know

(41:45):
when there as a clue, because obviously that would be
another bucketless thing for us. That would be great. Oh yeah, man,
can you imagine? Yeah, it'd be cool. Um so, uh,
the The New York Times actually deb ammon Um wrote
a or am and sorry. She hosted a blog post,
a four or five part blog post that is really

(42:06):
in depth that where she interviewed the people who actually
edit and create the New York Times crosswords and how
they do it. And it is not at all created
the way that I thought they were created. Did you
see that at all? I haven't looked at that yet.
It's it's on my list because I know it's going
to inform my process, but I've I've been kind of waiting.
Is there like a I kind of thought there might

(42:28):
be programs that help you sort of lay it out.
They mentioned that they do use programs to kind of
basically create grids and stuff like that more easily, but
they don't use things like auto phil which will just
populate it with words and then come up with suggested
like clues or anything like that. They come up with
them themselves, which you would hope with the New York

(42:48):
Times crossword puzzle. But the way that they create this,
and I think it's like almost like an assembly line
if it's done the way the blog posts suggests, where
one team will come up with the theme and they'll
come up with the answers the words for that theme. Okay,
so let's say you have five five different words that

(43:09):
are the theme answers, and then that's it, they hand
it off to the next people. The next people will
create the grid and they have to figure out where
to put those five theme answers in there. And once
they have that done and they got they have the
black squares in there and everything like that, they hand
it off to the people who populate the grid with words. Um,

(43:29):
you want to avoid three letter words. You want to
definitely no more than no less than three three right, Um.
So it's actually kind of hard to come up with
words that are interesting, right, because those are your answers.
And then after that, after the whole thing's been populated,
they hand it off to the people who write the

(43:51):
clues based on the words in the grids. The deposite
of solving it. When you say day, though, do you
mean is this when The New York Times is doing
their own So yes, that's my impression. I think for
the most part, if you write, if you create, sorry,
construct your own crossword, you're doing every step of this.

(44:12):
I don't know if they broke it down into teams
of two to make sure that everybody was interviewed in this,
or if they really do it assembly line style, and
a team of two will create the theme. A team
of two will create the grid, a team of three
populates it with words, and a team of two does
the clues, writes the clues. But it's it's really mind
boggling how how it all comes together. It comes together

(44:33):
in the opposite way that you you would solve the puzzle,
which is one reason why Will Shortz. He was interviewed
by Neil Conan and I Think Science Friday, where he said, like,
people who are constructors are typically not good at solving
the puzzles and vice versa. If you're really good at
solving a puzzle, it does not mean you're gonna necessarily

(44:54):
be good at constructing it. You know who's good at both?
Who is manning the south key? Yeah? Because Manny retired
from a medical practice in nineteen eighty three and got
was really into it and was published in ninety four,
and then since that time has created two hundred and
fifty four New York Times crosswords to be the most

(45:17):
prolific writer. I'm sorry, constructor, we keep saying that. Yeah,
I know, it's tough to remember. So Will Shortz. When
he started in ninety three, he was getting forty to
fifty submissions of meet a week, mostly from people age
fifty or over. Yeah, And as of April twenty twenty one,
he started getting about two hundred submissions a week. That
means two hundred different people went to the trouble of

(45:39):
creating a crossword and sending it into the New York Times.
And the age has declined tremendously to about the mid
to late thirties today on average. And that's in large
part because Will Shortz made a determined effort, like you
were saying, to be way more inclusive in the crossword world. Yeah,
and women get a little bit of a bump. I
think twenty percent of submissions come from women, but about

(46:03):
thirty percent of published puzzles or from women. And I
was kind of under the impression that all of their
puzzles were submitted, so I didn't know that anyone on
staff was writing them. I'm curious of the breakdown there. Yeah,
I am as well. I don't know, because they said
that they get about two hundred submissions per week, but

(46:24):
they're only running seven, so that means that the acceptance
rate is about three to four percent, which would mean
that they are accepting like they're running nothing but submissions
rather than housemade ones. Yeah, this really made me pause,
and I'm like, how much time do I want to
put into something that I have a ninety seven percent
chance of like failing. Well, you know, there's other places

(46:44):
that run cross words aside from the Times and Pleasures
would be more than happy to take us other pleasures
do you derive just from having done so? I think
it'd be a good even if it doesn't get published.
That doesn't mean, you know, I wrote a great seventy
show spec script that never did anything, but in my
mind it lives as a real episode. I wrote a
great Simpsons episode that it's right anything, and I love

(47:07):
it too. Yeah, agreed. I'll tell you what people love though,
is crosswords. And watch that documentary word Play, because you
will see a lot of it about the American crossword
puzzle tournament, which started in nineteen seventy eight. When crosswords
kind of after the twenties and thirties, they didn't go
away or anything, but they kind of laid a little

(47:29):
more low until the late seventies and they really kind
of picked up steam again. And the marketing director of
a Marriott hotel in Stanford, Connecticut said, Hey, in the wintertime,
no one's coming up here. So let's let's do a
crossword puzzle tournament like an official New York Times thing,
and get Will Schwartz to help us plant And they've
been doing it there ever since, and it's I think

(47:50):
it's in late March early April this year, and they
get you know, close to a thousand people coming to
this thing. Yeah, and you get a really good sense
of what it's like in word play, like you were
really a great Like if if this has been at
all interesting to you this episode, go check out word Play.
You will absolutely love it. Even if you're not into
cross words. It's a great you know, um, social what

(48:12):
is the word social connector bonder know, the type of
documentary where it's like a little peak inside of Oh yeah,
one of those, Yeah, one of those. It's worth seeing
for sure. As far as the making you smarter, And
this was something that you and I talked a little
bit about. Like one of the reasons I started doing
it is because I wasn't the impression that word games

(48:35):
kept you from descending into dementia. And it kind of
depends on the study. Some studies have sort of confirmed
or at least backed it up. Some studies said there
was no effect. Some studies say that it might just
be the placebo effect happening. Other people say, like, these
things are fine, but being like genuinely creative with your

(48:58):
brain is better for staving off dementia. So I've read
this stuff and I was a little disappointed, but I
kind of figure it. It can't hurt, and it's can
be a part of the recipe of keeping your brain sharp. Yeah,
as far as I know, none of the studies where like,
don't do crosswords, they're going to completely rot your brain. Yeah. Yeah,
that one about the placebo effect I thought was pretty interesting.

(49:20):
When they advertised the puzzle as a brain training people
did better on IQ test than people who were in
a control group and did the same puzzle, but it
wasn't advertised as brain training. So I don't think it matters.
If a placebo effect doesn't matter, it doesn't diminish it.
You know, like if you can take a sugar pill
and get the same result as taking a medication, like great,

(49:44):
that's fantastic. I don't understand why everybody's always putting down
the placebo effect. Yeah, that sugar pill probably didn't have
side effects too. Well, it is sugar, so there's probably some.
But you know, there was a study in twenty fourteen
that found that if you were a crossword or scrabble
it says expert, but I would even say enthusiasts, then
you had a stronger working memory than the group compared,

(50:08):
which was I think college students who had a seven
hundred or better verbal on the SAT. Yeah, and apparently
they're better at like VISU visuo. Can I say that right?
I don't think so. I think that is right visuo
spatial information and integrating verbal and visualus. Oh man, visual space.

(50:29):
You're not gonna help me? Help you? Are you no? Vs? Information?
How about that vs? Information in your short term memory? Jeez,
I gotta go finish. I'm ironically pretty stumped on today's crossword,
as you can tell. Oh yeah, have you been doing
it while we've been talking? No, no, no, I made
a little bit of time earlier, but I'll usually not
do it all in one go, like the Monday through Thursday,

(50:51):
I'm sorry, the money through Wednesday I can generally knock
out pretty quick like Mondays. Sometimes you can knock those
out in like eleven minutes, and that's super speed. Yeah,
I've done that's my record. I think, Wow, that's impressive, man.
But uh yeah. Shout out to Ben and uh John
Hodgeman and Mark Gagliardi another podcasting friend who was who

(51:11):
was an enthusiast. Nice, it's fun, fun doing this stuff.
Shout out to all you constructors and solvers out there. Right. Yeah,
well hope if I ever get my own byline, then
you can bet stuff. You should know we'll be a clue. Awesome.
I appreciate that big time. Chuck. Uh, since that is
probably it, right, you got anything else? Yah? Nothing else? Well,

(51:31):
then that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm
gonna call this correction on animal stuff. Oh boy, this
is from Daniel. This is a good correction too, because
this feels like one of those things is just printed
everywhere and everyone believes it's true. But apparently possums don't
eat ticks. Yeah, okay, all right, fine, Hey guys, I'm

(51:55):
writing because I was listening to the Possums podcast and
I heard you repeat an old myth that was fact,
and I wanted to set the record straight. The idea
that possums eat thousands of six a year is a
complete myth. It's based on a single study in which
researchers placed one hundred larval ticks on many different animals,

(52:15):
waited four days, then counted all the ones that fell off,
the ones that did not fall off or assumed to
have been eaten. Someone read that study assumed this was
the same as the number of ticks they'd eat in
the wild, and came up with the numbers that we heard.
So is there anything out there that disproves it, or
is this really just a critique of the quality of

(52:37):
the study In the extrapolation Part two? Okay, more recently, guys,
the study was done with possums in the wild and
found no evidence that they ever eat ticks. They checked
the stomach of many wild possums, couldn't find evidence of
even a single tick eaten. Here's a link to an
article on the study, and this is from Field and

(52:59):
Stream mags. Then I'm not gonna argue with those guys.
They carry guns. Yeah, they cover both field and stream.
So just a couple of things. Number one, Daniel ruins everything. No.
Number two, I still have plenty of possum pride, and
it's fine. It doesn't diminish the possums one iota in

(53:21):
my eyes. Nice try Daniel, No, I agree. I think
it's like possums were great before the tick thing, so
they're certainly great taking the tick thing away. Yeah, okay,
fair enough. I can tell you that instagrammer is not
gonna like this. Well, you know, what are you gonna do?

(53:45):
Can't please everybody, No, you can't. If you want to
be like Daniel and ruin something for us, or try
to but fail at it terribly, you can do it
via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(54:07):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.