New York Times, Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Matthew:

I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for the first time in 2011. Roz Chast was the awards presenter that year. Before handing out the awards, she read a short essay. The essay humorously highlighted many of the entries that frequently appear in crosswords, commonly referred to as crosswordese. A year or so later, I returned to this essay and the idea of taking a set of common crossword entries and turning them into a puzzle. My idea was to make the crosswordese words the clues, and what would typically be the clues for these words, the answers.

I compiled a list of crosswordese words, but soon realized there needed to be more to this theme than just selecting a subset of these words and then developing theme answers that were of the appropriate length. So I revisited the list, and noticed a lot of these words began with the letter E. It then occurred to me that if all the words began with "E", a revealer for the puzzle could be CROSSWORDESE, which not only was a pun but also an apt description of the theme answer clues.

I passed the idea by Jeff, and he really liked it. One improvement he suggested immediately was to change one of the original theme clues — EEE (wide shoe spec) — to EMIR, as EEE was the only theme clue of the set that was not four letters long. Over time, there were further adjustments made in order to get theme answers to match up by length, which ultimately resulted in one of the original clues, the ever-popular EWER, being replaced by the equally crowd-pleasing ETUI.

In terms of filling the rest of the puzzle, we felt it was important to keep the crosswordese to a minimum. In general this is a good approach to take, but even more so when you're already drawing attention to crosswordese in the puzzle's theme. I think for the most part we were successful in this, the occasional ONO, ANAT, and OBOE notwithstanding.

Thanks for reading. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work on my next puzzle: lesser-known, four-letter European rivers.

And now for our next installment of JEFF VS. DAN, where Jeff feebly attempts to solve his own puzzles faster than ACPT champion Dan Feyer. Seeing as how Dan spanked me silly in our last round, I decided to give myself a significant advantage: not only did I look at the answers beforehand, but I STUDIED them. I tried to memorize as many as I could so I'd be able to fill answers in just based on letter patterns. My time was a personal best: 2:25. Check back in to see what times Dan and the other speedsters clock in at.

ADDED NOTE: Drat it! David Plotkin, aka Bug Out, checked in at 1:57... ON PAPER. That's almost 30 seconds faster than me, using a slower solving medium (I solve on computer). Sigh.

Matthew contacted me with this idea, and I thought it was hilarious, and insider's nod to the crosswordese that often must be used to glue a puzzle together. And to have all common E words that were all "four-letter words" just tickled me. We went to work trying to figure out appropriate definitions, and given my distaste for entries that sound like they're from a dictionary (I just don't find them fun to uncover in a crossword), we batted around many phrases until we arrived at ones we felt like we'd be fine with seeing in a normal xw.

The fill was especially challenging, especially because if we incorporated a single piece of crosswordese (outside of the themers), the puzzle just wouldn't seem elegant. Not to mention, we'd leave ourselves open to all sorts of chop-busting from our crossword friends. So it took a long, long time figure out an arrangement of those five themers which would allow us to produce a relatively clean fill. I don't like that we had to leave in REE or ANAT or the singular TAPA, but almost every crossword with five themers is bound to have something.

Now, if we could have just fit in FOUR LETTER WORDS...

A more extreme example of this kind of reverse crosswordese can be found in this 2009 puzzle by Arthur Schulman where the theme clues were "Ais", "Ocas", "Moas", "Eri", "Ara", and "Ers".