Senior history major
Take a look at the page to the right. You know, the one with robots, fortune cookies (without the cookie) and half-assed drink specials. Amid the clutter is a big square inhabited by a strange arrangement of blank and filled-in smaller squares. It would be wise to assume you know this is called a crossword puzzle, but what’s less well-known is how crossword puzzles found themselves over on that page next to the Leos and the Virgos, or why anyone bothers with them at all.
The modern crossword puzzle dates back to 1913, when Arthur Wynne, an English immigrant to the United States, was asked to create a new game for The New York World’s Fun section, which apparently was anything but fun at the time. Based on a more elementary children’s word game at the time called “magic squares,” Wynne’s puzzle took the shape of a diamond and offered clues to help readers fill in the blank spaces. The game soon became popular on both sides of the Atlantic, as crossword puzzles found a home nestled in the leafy pages of newspapers around the world and adjacent to the Opinion section in our very own Diamondback.
In 1942, The New York Times established crossword puzzles’ modern conventions, namely symmetrical grids with blackened-out squares, solutions at least three letters long, multi-word answers and subtler clues. The Times crossword puzzle is without a doubt the world’s most popular. Its success comes from a distinct pattern of increasing difficulty as the week progresses (Monday is the easiest while I’d be hard-pressed to fill in one word on a Sunday) and the unsurpassed quality and cleverness with which it is created and edited.
The evil mastermind behind The Times crossword — he’s only evil when the puzzle is just so dang hard to solve — is probably one of my top-five favorite human beings alive today. His name is Will Shortz, and he has been editing The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993 while founding and overseeing the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament since 1978. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, Shortz took the “create-your-own-major” option to heart when he decided to pursue enigmatology, the study of puzzles. Now, he is the face — and brains — of crossword puzzles. There’s even a movie about him, a 2006 documentary called Wordplay. What Justin Bieber is to 12-year-old girls, or Yo-Yo Ma is to cello enthusiasts, that’s what Will Shortz is to American crossword fanatics.
Unlike Shortz, I am no cruciverbalist — a word meaning “a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles” — but nonetheless I do get a thrill from doing the crossword puzzle, or the small chunk of it I can fill in. I like doing crosswords because they test such a wide swath of knowledge, from sports to literature to pop culture. Most people have a similar inclination to solve puzzles and test their wits. It is built into our humanity. How else can you explain the success of Sporcle, Words With Friends or even the game show Jeopardy!? Like Shortz says, puzzle solving “scratches an itch that we don’t reach in any other way.” I’ll gladly scratch away.
Neal Freyman is a senior history major. He can be reached at nfreyman3@gmail.com.
