A simple clue can function like a headline, conveying a perspective while eliding that the writer may not endorse that perspective, let alone that the clue change wasn’t communicated to her in the first place. To wake up, grab the paper, and see that the editor had moved the frame of reference from Sadat to this American citizen who hadn’t committed any violent acts, whose case even the American Civil Liberties Union had taken up-to have that cultural frame reoriented was jarring. That clue was swapped without permission. For all editors’ hand-wringing over the “breakfast test”-puzzles shouldn’t gross out morning solvers with anything too bodily or grim, this picture of liberal placidness-surely referencing the corpse of an extrajudicial killing fails the test on its own terms! Generally, behind the curtain of the “breakfast test” is a whack-a-mole game premised on a white male ick factor-the roadside bomb “IED” is fine, but “IUD,” get that out of my puzzle. The inanimate object, the drone strike, is worthy of the mantle “American” but al-Alwaki, a Yemeni-American U.S. The second time ANWAR was clued differently was in our puzzle the Times editors changed it to “_ al-Awlaki, terrorist targeted in a 2011 American drone strike.” Of course, there are countless Anwars worthy of cultural touch that don’t get clued, including the heterodox economist Anwar Shaikh. We once had “ANWAR” in a Times puzzle, which longtime solvers know is often, if not always, clued as Anwar Sadat. On weekends, I teach seniors how to write crosswords, and we submit our co-constructed puzzles. But you can also see when “NADA” stopped getting a tag about its Spanishness, because, in both a happy story and in a more imperialist story, nada becomes an English word.īut this is also frustrating for crossword writers who can’t control how words are represented in the grid. The New York Times had this data visualization that showed, for instance, when clues for “UBER” shifted from the German word to the company. And the idea that two words, “African menace,” could sum up the Mau Mau is so silly.Ĭrosswords also track the imperialist reach of English bringing concepts into its orbit. There’s a struggle against concision and for autonomy in that story, both relevant to clue writing. I’m reminded of something Noam Chomsky said, that he didn’t want to go on certain news shows knowing they’d shave down his comments to two or three sentences, then pair them with a contradictory image. Solvers come to expecting clue and answer to be isomorphic-to have this sense like, “we did our homework and we, the people behind this puzzle, are representing it well.” There are a number of problems with that. The crossword form bakes in a historiography of terms. There is no room for elaboration you just have the clue and the answer to work with. So there is something that happens that is not just about the answer to the clue, but the way that terms are clued, which is significant given the constraints of the crossword form itself. They were clued as “terrorists” and an “African menace” in the 1960s and 1970s, but started being clued as “freedom fighters” in crosswords beginning in the 2000s. For instance, when we last spoke, we talked about the Mau Mau, the decolonizing rebels in Kenya. Camila Valle: Crosswords can be understood as reflections of society, particular historical periods, and how ideas change over time-as broad indexes of shifts in consciousness.
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