Crossword: 29:29

Not a bad time, and no google. The theme was a little like the Beehive puzzle the Times puts out on Sundays, where they give you 7 letters and you have to make as many 5+ letter words using only those letters (one particular letter has to be in every word, but you can repeat letters as much as you want). This has crossing words that can be spelled with each others' letters and can be clued the same way, like Pistachios and Potato Chips, Outstanding and Astounding. It's cute, although I pretty much solved them independently. I suppose if you solve SCHMEAR first, CREAM CHEESE might be easier to get, but when the clue is "bagel topping," you didn't need the help, and when the words get longer, it's much less helpful.

I'm going to talk a little about cryptic puzzles. Occasionally, I'll be doing a cryptic, and people will offer to help, or ask for a clue because they like to show off their smarts. I can sympathize. It sounds horribly pretentious, but the most accurate response is "you wouldn't understand." Here is a cryptic clue:

Circle newspaper piece about Russia's premier. (5)

The answer is ORBIT. Obvious, right?

Cryptic clues are split into two parts, the definition and the wordplay. In this case, the definition is "Circle." Russia's Premier? That's the letter "R." the "premier" (first letter) of Russia. The newspaper piece in this case is OBIT.* Put OBIT "about" R, and you get ORBIT, i.e. Circle. Other clues can involve homophones, anagrams, double-meanings, hidden words, and combinations therein (the ORBIT clue is known as a "container" clue - one thing inside another).

When I explain how clues work (and this would be considered a fairly simplistic example), people look at me weird and mentally back away slowly, so "you wouldn't understand" is almost always the truth. Even if they do understand, it takes time to get proficient. Furthermore, many cryptic puzzles are something more than just a typical crossword. Sometimes locations or answer lengths are withheld. Or you need to modify clues before you entered them. One particularly devious puzzle had clues grouped in fours, except the 4th clue was 3 blanks. In each of the other 3 clues, one word from each was extraneous to solving the clue, and those 3 extraneous words could combine to make a 4th clue.

I'm certainly not some savant. Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon do the bi-weekly Acrostic for the Times, but also a monthly cryptic in the Wall Street Journal and I can usually manage. Richard Maltby does a monthly puzzle for Harper's, and I savagely cheat. His puzzles are real bears. It's a monthly magazine, and they might very well take the whole month. When I was worse and the WSJ puzzle was new, I'd hop on their forums where other clueless people fish for hints, and usually someone was stuck on the same clue as me. But Harper's forums are locked to non-subscribers. Sometimes I get how to solve a clue but I suck at finding PTERODACTYL from POTTERY CLAD, so I use a Scrabble cheat tool (sucks when I'm looking for a proper name). But when I'm truly stuck, but I have a few letters, I go to onelook.com. You can put in strings of letters with ?s for unknown letters and it will bring up all the words that fit, and you can sort them by commonness. You can't do this with too many blanks, and it's super-cheaty, but like most crossworders, I'm obsessed with completion, and sometimes it's all you can do.

*How do you get OBIT? Newspaper piece could mean anything! You usually don't solve clues by taking apart the whole thing and putting it together piece by piece unless it's just a straight anagram. I just thought about words that meant circle and fit into the grid and happened upon ORBIT, which fit the clue. A lot of clues are solved by retroactive justification. When I'm cheating, sometimes just a thesaurus is enough. Also, it's sort of assumed that anyone doing cryptics is well-versed in crosswordese, and you'll see some words that are more uncommon outside a crossword, like ARID, figure into cryptic puzzles too.