by Herbert Goldstone
The title of this column includes a line from Shakespeare’s immortal “Hamlet.” It’s the troubled prince of Denmark’s bored reply when Laertes asks him what he’s reading: “Words, words, words.”
I like words. I like to play around with them and do things with them, over and above their common use as my way of communicating, orally or in writing, with others.
As someone who made a living for many years using words as a newspaperman, doing some dabbling in fiction and still using words part time, writing pieces like this one, I developed a close familiarity with words. They’ve been my raw material.
I’ve always liked word games. It’s fun matching my linguistic skill, such as it is, with opponents in a game like Scrabble, where you get seven wooden tiles with letters on them and try to fit them into squares on a board to make words giving you the highest possible score.
If you’re not familiar with Scrabble, which has been around for a lot of years, each letter has a certain value, depending on how frequently it appears in any kind of speech or text. Common letters like E or I are only worth one point each. Uncommon letters like Q or Z are worth 10 points each.
And, of course, a Q is worthless without a U to follow it.
There are some words that use Q without a U in the Official Scrabble Dictionary, but they’re hardly in common use.
The Scrabble board has squares where you double the tile value of the letter or word and some get triple value. It takes a knack for language to fit as many of your letters as you can into the pattern that’s already on the board.
If you get a word like “quiz” with both the Q and the Z in a triple-word space, you rack up a lot of points. You also play defensively, trying not to leave an open triple-word space for your opponent.
If you use all seven of your letters in one word, you get a bonus of 50 points. You replace the letters you use from a common pile that’s left, and the first person who uses all of his or her letters wins. There are a few blank tiles that can be any letter you want them to be.
Scrabble’s a game for two or more people, but there are a few very enjoyable word games you can play just by yourself.
The most popular, I would guess, is doing crossword puzzles. Every newspaper and lots of magazines have them, and there are books of crossword puzzles. The puzzles in the newspapers range from fairly simple to medium tough to the large puzzles they run in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Unless you’re some kind of word genius, you have to consult the dictionary a few times.
They always have a few very long answers, with some as long as the entire width or height of the puzzle and two or more words in length.
Sometimes the Times and other papers print diagramless puzzles. T crossword puzzles are always totally symmetric so the solver has to determine which boxes are blacked out.
I find them pretty tough and they require a lot more patience than I have with regular crossword puzzles.
My favorites are cryptic crossword puzzles. None of the clues in that kind is straight English. The answer might be in the form of an anagram or be contained inside the clue. For example, the answer might be the word “later.” The clue might include the word “unilateral” and say something like “The thing he did by himself (unilateral) didn’t get done on time.” In other words, it was later. The clue will tell you the answer is one five-letter word.
Cryptic crosswords always tell you how many words are in an answer, one or more, and how many letters are in each answer. If they didn’t, you might as well quit. A cryptic puzzle always looks impossible when you start it, but you can usually figure out one or two answers after you stare at it for a while, and you work it from there.
I remember one clue that said, “There great anger in the building in the Southern state.” Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The answer was “garage.” Ga. is the abbreviation for Georgia, a Southern state, and “rage” is anger. The building was a garage.
Then there are the impossible crossword puzzles they run in the New York Magazine, taken from London’s Manchester Guardian. They’re not only mind-breaking tough, but they use their kind of English. Words that we end in “or,” such as “flavor,” they spell as “flavour.” And if you don’t happen to know they call gasoline “petrol” in England, you have a real problem.
A wag once remarked that England and the United States are two countries “separated by a common language.”
Another word game you can play by yourself is trying to solve a cryptogram. In a cryptogram, every letter in the alphabet stands for another letter. Every E is a W in the cryptogram, every B is a G, etc. and you have to figure out which letter is which.
There are several clues that help. Except in very rare instances, a single letter has to be either an A or an I. The letter used most often is probably an E. If there’s a double letter in a word, it can’t be a lot of letters, like Q or W. If you know the last letter in a word is G, there’s a good chance the two before it are I and N. That’s because a lot of words end in ING.
If there’s an apostrophe and a single letter at the end of a word, it’s most likely T, S or occasionally D. Or it might be “I’m.” You try them all.
The Sunday Daily News prints four tough cryptograms that I have fun solving. There’s only been one that I had to give up on. It had two words that turned out to be “hideous” and “hideout.”
I tried what seemed like a million combinations of letters, but never got those. The sentence, as I remember, was something about a “hideous ogre in a hideout.”
By the way, there are puzzles where there’s a large square with random letters and you have to find certain words in it, up, down or diagonal. Others give you one word and you have to see many words you can make of the letters in it.
Knowing of my addiction to word puzzles, my son and daughter-in-law gave me an interesting birthday present a few years ago. They made up a crossword puzzle where all the answers were things or people in my life or places where I lived or visited.
It took me a while to finish it, too.
