Wierd World of Crosswords
Sorry, make that Weird.
Repeat after me: I before E except after C, I before E except after C…
Last week I committed a mortal sin. Two in fact if you count the road-rage incident where I murdered a myopic Volvo driver for his failure to indicate, but the main blue was professional.
In a mainstream cryptic, appearing in both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne last Friday, I misspelt a simple four-letter entry. The word was WEIR, which I had down [21-down in fact] as WIER.
Egregious? Yes. Sloppy? Uh-huh. Unforgivable? Well, here I’m hoping for a grain of mercy.
While I can’t defend a compiler entering flawed words into his puzzle – that’s the equivalent of a baker adding wing-nuts to his pies – I can explain how the error took place.
The original entry was PIER, which is how the dictionary knows it. At proofing stage, combing the clues for typos or smelly red herrings, I noticed a larger entry in the same grid: WARRAGAMBA, at 14-down.
For those outside Sydney, Warragamba (an Aboriginal phrase thought to mean ‘water running over rocks’) is the main depleted dam supplying the city’s homes.
Hmm, I thought, blue pencil in hand. Why not change PIER to WIER [sic] and reword the clue to make the entry resonate with WARRAGAMBA? It’s always preferable to give a puzzle some extra depth that way.
But alas, this blinding flash was more blinding than flashy. Despite seeming twins, PIER and WEIR have different parents. While Old English long adopted the two watery words, PIER stems from the quaint French for stone (or piere) while WEIR is German born, hailing from the verb, wehren, to hinder or defend.
Lame, I know, but the lazy logic went CLICK. I took the words as sisters with only their initials helping us to tell them apart. Hence I embedded the bungle at the 10th hour, while the 11th hour security sweep by a Herald reader, prior to press, likewise failed to trip the alarms.
Not unfairly, the baying hounds of Crikey, chatrooms and Letters pages have yet to hit diminuendo. To all plaintiffs, my apologies. WIER is bad for business. Spelling mistakes dent my name as a puzzle setter, as well as the banners of the papers who ran it. Despite popular myth, Fairfax does have a proofing phase built into the crossword process, a two-way exchange between setter and typesetter, but the resources will never match the priorities that other august papers in the UK and US afford their puzzles.
I say that with envy. Solving offshore crosswords, both quicks and cryptics, I can count on one hand the errors I’ve encountered, and most of these a clear result of online versions failing to transfer the correct coding. But Will Shortz, the New York Times Crossword Editor, will fess up to running TEAPOT as a kitchen screamer, when really that’s a KETTLE, as we all know. Just as WIER looks heretical in the cold morgue light.
Did I hear the kettle? Surely it’s time for a cuppa. But not a liedown – not just yet. I have another puzzle to make. I can’t afford to run and hide - neither mortgage nor logophilia will brook it. After lunch it’s time take a deep breath (and a fresh list of words) and leap into the black water.