The Hindu Business Line : Puzzling ways

IN the 1960s, in the city then known as Calcutta, whose citizens well known for erudition and scholarship, the story used to be told of a chief secretary who sitting in the India Coffee House used to do the Times crossword everyday before his coffee was brewed and brought to him. To him and many such others, solving the crossword is as addictive as the morning coffee. The crossword continues to be the most popular sedentary recreation for millions of us. Despite its huge success when it was first introduced, for long newspapers considered it infra dig to have such trivialities. In order not to appear frivolous The Times London in its early days used to occasionally print crosswords in Latin!

Crosswords as they appear in most English dailies demand mastery of the entire gamut of verbal possibilities — puns, anagrams, palindromes, general knowledge and whatever else springs to the devious mind of the setter.

Manipulation of spelling is what makes the exercise most engaging. For instance, only the confirmed crossword addict can figure out "We all make his praise" is an anagram for the bard William Shakespeare; or "Circumstantial evidence" for "can ruin a selected victim"; or "schoolmaster" for "the classroom"; or better still "mother-in-law" for "woman Hitler." Computers have been programmed to play complicated moves in chess. There is the famous Deep Blue, giving Kasparov a run for his money. However, solving crosswords, so to say, is a different ball game and is exactly what the computers are bad at. For they require general knowledge and lateral thinking. Yet, some brave scientists in the US have attempted to develop software called Proverb to solve crosswords, particularly the American genre. However, it could not solve more than three of the 78 clues when they involved spoonerism.

Talking about spoonerism, the name is derived from Reverend William Spooner of Oxford who habitually transposed sounds — technically called metaphasis — making his statements hilariously funny. To a delinquent undergraduate: "You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford by the next town drain". More funny is his metaphasis of thought. He approached a fellow Don and told him, "Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson." The man answered, "But, Sir, I am Casson." To which Spooner replied, "Never mind, come all the same.'

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