Most of you spent your summers in enjoyable ways: family vacations, lounging in the sun or resetting your sleep cycle back to that of a hibernating bear. Or perhaps you were able to find a job, gaining valuable experience and ... actually, probably just experience, in the case of most internships.
As for me, I spent my summer developing another one of my unhealthy obsessions. It all began so innocently; I was looking for a way to keep occupied on my commute to work. But before too long, I had become another slave of the crossword puzzle.
A British journalist invented the crossword puzzle in the early 20th century, and despite what your history books may tell you, global productivity has been on a steady decline ever since. If I had money to throw around, I’d invest in the economies of countries whose languages don’t lend themselves to organization in grids. The rest of us are going to be stuck in the dark ages trying to find a five-letter word for “inundate” and praying our pencil lead doesn’t give out.
It’s hard to say what gives these puzzles their addictive quality, but it’s definitely tough to put one down until it’s finished. For one thing, they always seem to be deceptively brief undertakings — the total amount of writing involved is around 200 letters. For us college students, that’s the work of a few seconds, tops. Many of us have had to take notes from at least one professor whose lecture tempo would be more appropriate at a cattle auction. So when you have five or 10 minutes to kill, it seems like a perfect idea to spread open the ol’ crossword puzzle.
Sadly, these little beasties are rarely, if ever, easy to solve. There are, of course, exceptions; not all puzzle sources are created equal. While the New York Times puzzle is fairly challenging, in other papers you might see clues such as “opposite of north.” But most of the time, I find that I’m required to recall pop culture trivia about obscure foreign-born actors, protagonists of forgotten novels and TV shows that were invented five minutes after the television was. When I form my mental image of a crossword creator huddled over a worktable somewhere, he’s wearing a Lawrence Welk T-shirt.
A crossword solver does improve with practice. This is partly because repeated solving improves mental endurance, but it’s more due to the fact that puzzle masters use the same three and four-letter contrivances to fill those little spaces. These terms may not be well-known to the general public, but I guarantee you that every crossword solver out there knows Boston Bruins great Bobby Orr, novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, that margarine is sometimes called oleo and that the direction from New York to Los Angeles is WSW. The worst is when the puzzle creator just gives up entirely and writes in a clue like “snake’s declaration” so he can plug in “SSS.” Pretty weak stuff in my book.
I’ve decided that the ideal place to do crosswords is in private. There’s something about the crossword that makes everybody want to get involved. When people see you doing the crossword, they immediately assume you couldn’t possibly be capable of finishing it by yourself, for goodness’ sake, and that they must ride to your rescue by reminding you that “Hero in boots” is likely to be “Puss,” or some other equally impressive revelation. This almost always leads to an unpleasant confrontation. It’s also why I never do crosswords on airplanes; that environment is dangerous enough, ever since claiming space in the overhead bins became a matter of life and death.
There’s a crossword puzzle a page or two away in this very newspaper, and I imagine that reading this column has, besides nearly putting you to sleep, given many of you a hankering to solve that bad boy. By all means, go ahead! Solving puzzles is good mental exercise, and if you’re better than I at containing your anger, they can actually be quite soothing. But put the pen away and break out the pencil. College is a time for living life to the full, but there’s no need to be reckless.
Matt’s column runs biweekly Fridays. He can be reached at m.waring@cavalierdaily.com.
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