A note about crosswords

Spencer Aloysius asked, in a comment on my previous entry, "Does the NYT crossword puzzle get harder as the week goes along?"

It now occurs to me that not everyone does the Times crossword, so allow me to explain.

The crossword does indeed get harder as the week progress from Monday to Saturday. There are a number of ways to make a crossword harder. One is to use fewer, longer words; with more words in a grid, there's more likely to be some word that the solver can fill in, and any filled-in word is a major advantage to solving the words that cross it. Fewer long words also breaks the grid up more; often on a Friday or Saturday puzzle, I find myself almost finished except for one corner, and I've already filled in the only words that enter that corner, so I can't go somewhere else and hope to get more letters for it from a different side.

Another is to use trickier themes, or to use no theme at all. Friday and Saturday crosswords are often themeless. To take a recent theme: the April 10 crossword had, as theme entries, "color combos": "Communist Beatles movie?", "Depressed Beantown nine?", and "Cowardly IBM and GE shares?" (all 15 letters). It took some crossing letters to get the first clue--which is (red + Yellow Submarine) = ORANGESUBMARINE; but once I had that, the other two clues were much easier, and that was another thirty letters into the grid. Without a theme entry, you're on your own.

And finally, the same word can be clued in a number of different ways, depending on how hard you want to make the clue. The example I tend to use is that, faced with a five-letter word for "Bridge place," you might be misled into thinking RIVER or CREEK or MUSIC or many other things; for the same word, the clue "Ollie, for one" might be somewhat easier; and the clue "Compass direction" will be quite easy--it's going to be one of two words, at any rate. (Or, to take a few clues from a recent Saturday puzzle: nine letters for "Author who received an O.B.E. in 2001" or seven letters for "They may attract workers" could be clued much more straightforwardly in an easier puzzle. (I'll put the answers in the first comment, just to give you a chance to think.)

The Sunday puzzle is, in difficulty, about the level of a Thursday puzzle, but instead of being a 15x15 grid, it's a 21x21, which is nearly twice as many squares to fill in, so it naturally takes longer.

There you are, folks, more than you wanted to know about crosswords

Random musing

An excerpt from my other journal"

I grew up, as is traditional, chafing at my parents' authority. And as is also tradition, my father often used the explanation "As long as you live under my roof you have to obey my rules. When you have your own house you can make your own rules." I moved out of my parents' house in 1991 when I went to college, and with a few exceptions--three months after the summer after freshman year, a month and a half between college and grad school in 1999--I haven't spent more than two weeks at a time there. (I'd be dramatic and say "in the house where I grew up," but we moved into it when I was 13. I nearly spent more time in Minnesota than I did in that house, though in truth I was a year short, plus the spare change of vacations.)

In any case, my parents have visited me at various times since then: Parents' Weekend frosh year, a trip to Minneapolis, helping me move out of Northfield, a number of trips to Boston over the last few years, some of them social and some jobhunting. But this was the first time either of them actually spent the night in a place I was paying for. As my houseguest. It didn't feel particularly momentous, but in some ways I think it is.