The reader is asked to forgive the writer’s carelessness in the title. What he meant was that there was never a crossword. Or was he just playing with words? He will be focussing on the English language quite simply because most of the research material you’re going to find will relate to the language most widely used across the world; namely English. When you open the pages produced by one of the most accomplished and amusing writers in the world today, Bill Bryson, you will end up – well, hopefully, not quite that – but thoroughly entertained.
He started around 30 years ago with three brilliant travel books about the United States, the United Kingdom and mainland Europe, respectively. Bryson has enlightened and enlivened with his humorous observational writings. Today, we’re devoting this space to the joys of wordplay. Plus, of course, Bill Bryson launched into that very subject himself when writing a book called ‘Mother Tongue’. He delves into the complexity and fascinating characteristics of the English language that we mostly take for granted; as well as its links and integration with other languages around the world. The broader picture is for another article. Today, it’s purely about wordplay.
It is truly remarkable that it took so long for the crossword to emerge in English-speaking society. A man called Arthur Wynne, in 1913, produced the first crossword that was published. It appeared in the New York magazine World. The Times of London adopted it in 1930 and since then has probably not missed a day. The Times crossword is a very challenging one. So difficult that most native English speakers wouldn’t manage even one clue. A guy called Roy Dean holds the world record of three minutes and 45 seconds for completing the Times crossword.
That is way off the charts and precipitated a remark by a pastor at Eton – that’s the famous public school where former UK Prime Ministers, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, were educated. The pastor claimed that he could do the Times crossword in the few minutes it took to boil an egg. This prompted a rather sharp bystander to suggest that the school may have been Eton, but the egg almost certainly wasn’t. I nearly fell out of the chair when I read that one.
According to a Gallup poll in the early 1990s and before smartphones changed the world, doing crosswords was the most popular sedentary leisure activity. A marvellous way to exercise the brain and not just from a literary or vocabulary perspective. The British crosswords demand a very high level of skill covering all sorts of verbal possibilities like puns, anagrams and palindromes. It’s more than just working out that carthorse is an anagram of orchestra. But when you get on to World Cup Team converting into talcum powder – you again marvel at what the human brain can achieve. The earliest anagrams were conceived in ancient Greek and Roman times. And a spectacular pun was created by Jesus Christ himself when he said: “Thou art Peter; upon this rock I shall build my Church.” In ancient Greek, the word Peter was both a name and a rock! Clever, eh!
The palindrome – where the sentence is also the same backwards as well as forwards – is another big favourite, even in modern times. Madam, I’m Adam is one of the simpler ones on the table. Though, when you get on to A man, a plan, a canal, Panama, you also get a story in the wordplay. The Greeks and Romans, two thousand years ago, enjoyed a kind of palindrome where words, not letters, were moved around and thus achieved a different meaning. As in (an English version) ‘Jack loves Jill’, not ‘Jane’, then converted into Jane, not Jill, loves Jack. That’s great fun.
Additionally, even when they weren’t doing crosswords, some famous writers turned their skills to creating anagrams. Lewis Caroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland, decided one night to compile an anagram out of the name of the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone. By morning (he was a bit obsessive) he had come up with Wild Agitator means well. That’s amazing. Equally so, former USA President, Ronald Wilson Reagan, will have discovered his name turned into ‘Insane Anglo Warlord’. Knowing his sense of humour, he’d have loved that. Ever heard of the rebus? That’s where words and symbols are rearranged and placed in an order that enables you to get the meaning. The most famous one, found on an envelope in the USA was: Wood, John and Mass. It allegedly did arrive at the intended destination! Which was to: ‘John Underwood’, ‘Andover’, ‘Massachusetts’ – get it? The rebus has since faded somewhat except on American licence plates, one example of part of a plate being ALLBCNU – a friendly goodbye to fellow motorists.
Then you get the silly plays with words. Famous writers would misfit words against others, merely to entertain, as in Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly and Fielding’s Miss Slipslop. Master of the word-muddlers was a warden of New College, Oxford in the early 1900s. His name was Reverend William Spooner who gave us the word spoonerism. A favourite one is – “You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm.” Finally – at least for today – we have the deliberate ambiguity for amusement purposes – ‘Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager’.
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