Words are something I enjoy, so I guess it is no wonder that crossword puzzles have long appealed to me.  They are great exercises for the mind, and build vocabulary skills as well as providing amusement on long airplane rides and in doctors’ waiting rooms.

(Suggestion to all doctors:  Move your offices to malls and give your patients vibrating pagers, such as the restaurants now do. Either that, or replace all those horrible old magazines covered with rhinoviruses with single-sheet stacks of puzzles. Better yet, don’t over-book!)

As far as the vocabulary-building part, I do admit that a crossword puzzle enthusiast may stand out in a conversation as a bit of an oddball, since certain words in crossword puzzles are not likely to be seen elsewhere unless one reads very old books.

“Eero evinced élan with his epee before ceding his fiefdom to the ogre.”

I prefer to work and complete a crossword without the aid of reference books.  If I do need to look something up, I try to limit myself to a dictionary.  Failing that, I turn to the computer, which has made the successful working of crossword puzzles ever so much easier, as the answers to such clues as “Artemis’ mother.”  I don’t know about you, but cluttering my head with the genealogy of the Greek gods and goddesses has never been high on my list.  Googling the answer  (Leto) is a breeze compared to the old days of having to turn to an encyclopedia.

One thing the crossword puzzle writers have turned to doing in recent years is using two-word answers.  Thus, the clue “Eat with gusto” may yield the answer “Dig in.”  Such an answer in the old days would have been forbidden, or would have been indicated in the clue itself as “Eat with gusto (2 wds.)”  but no more. Now anything is fair game. Perhaps this is to level the playing field since the advent of the personal computer.

I resisted the Sudoku craze for years, but at Christmas I was given a couple of electronic Sudoku games by my daughter and my son’s girl friend, and now I’ve been bitten.  Crossword puzzles have, for the time being, taken a back seat to the number puzzles, which are logic games, except there is nothing at all logical about sitting at the kitchen counter staring at 81 little squares and cursing while blowing eraser dust all over the Formica.

The problem with Sudoku is that if you advance far into a game and then discover that you have made an error somewhere, about your only option is to erase the entire thing and start over.  Backtracking is nearly impossible.  Those of us with short tempers and little patience tend to just take the pencil and draw a big “X” across the whole thing and select a new one.  I have a couple of Sudoku books sprinkled with “X’ed” out pages.

Since I tend to work puzzles when I watch TV, I feel that as the television drains my brain of intelligence, the puzzles build it back up, so it is an even match.  All the books I read add to the plus-side of the equation, and the normal aging process is destroying gray cells, so I should be holding my own.  

Unfortunately, the logic of this hypothesis seems to be failing, as even my cat and dog have taken to calling me “Dufus.”  

                                        © by Jim Whitehouse

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