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August 28, 2009

Strange But True!

Q. “The fans they chew their pencils,/The fans they beat their wives./They look up words for extinct birds —/ They lead such puzzling lives!” Fans of what, as penned by U.S. humorist Gelett Burgess some years ago?

A. The early 20th-century “word-cross” puzzle, later a “cross-word” puzzle, finally a “crossword,” by U.S. journalist Arthur Wynne, a Liverpudlian emigre who was trying for something boldly new for the 1913 Christmas edition of the New York Sunday newspaper “World,” says David Crystal in “Language Play.” Wynne originally slotted the words into a diamond-shaped grid which eventually became standardized into a square. The new fad crossed the Atlantic to Britain, where numerous organizations were invited to submit potential entries. At one point, it is reported, officials at the London Zoo announced they would no longer answer telephone enquiries about the gnu, the emu, or any other three-letter creatures. The genre is continually evolving, adds Crystal, with compilers devising more and more ingenious, even “tortuous” puzzles and adopting such professional pseudonyms as Torquemada and Ximenes, leaders of the Spanish Inquisition!


 
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