Welcome to On Words and Up Words!
A newsletter about words, word games, and especially cryptic crossword puzzles
Being British both by birth and disposition, it’s very difficult for me to just come right out and say this without a thousand caveats, but the fact of the matter is that I would very much like to make some cryptic crossword puzzles for you.
Wait!!!
Please don’t leave just yet. I’m also going to be writing about word puzzles in general; interesting things about words; and probably a good deal about some of words’ naughty little friends, like punctuation marks and grammatical categories, so there will be plenty in here to excite and titillate even the cryptic-skeptical. But let me say a few brief things about cryptic crossword puzzles first, because I know that people find them baffling. Most importantly, you don’t have to be a genius to solve them — you just have to know a few of their little tricks. There aren’t even really that many of them, though great cryptic setters can create endless variety within the old stable of tricks through misdirection and double meaning.
I’m hoping that I can shed some light on those tricks as we go along so that there will be plenty of footholds for newcomers to the format (which I’m kind of assuming is most readers). But what I’m really hoping is that I can share with you the immense joy, diversion, and satisfaction I have found in solving this type of puzzle, because as anyone knows who’s done a crossword with a partner on a lazy Sunday morning — or shared a Wordle result on a text chain — puzzling is a lot more fun with friends.
In short: If you love words, language, and wordplay, I’m going to be writing about all those things here — and setting some puzzles for you along the way. I’ll also provide all the information you’ll need to get past any initial barriers to entry, so the only thing anyone will need in order to have a pretty good time is a fondness for those quirky, versatile, incredibly useful lexical units we call words.
I always do classic crosswords and then look longingly but uncomprehendingly at the cryptic puzzle, so I’m thrilled to be getting some guidance on tackling them.