Good Crossword Clues

And bad

My genius wife and I have started doing the New York Times crossword on Sundays. If you’ve never done a crossword, here’s how it works. Each blank square holds one letter. Put together, the letters spell a word. Hints to what the words are appear next to the puzzle. Solve the hint, solve the word, use the word’s letters to solve other words, and so on. Pretty easy to follow, right?

WRONG! Plenty of crossword makers believe the rules do not apply to them, and break the rules in service to a “fun” “theme.” A theme isn’t inherently bad, but almost everyone abuses it and makes a worse puzzle. Here are some of the offenders.

One letter per box… except in some cases.

I hate this theme. Each box holds ONE, count ‘em again, ONE letter. If your puzzle relies on certain boxes containing two letters, three letters, or — damn you straight to hell — a whole fucking phrase, you have failed in your crossword forging.

“A sport played on a dohyo” was one of these clues.

Aonishiki getting big billing this basho!

“Sumo!” I exclaimed, which by the way is on right now this week and next. However, the answer was only 3 boxes long. The “fun” “theme” was putting ‘su’ in one box.

Puts this comic in a new light.

Fill in the blank

Fill-in-the-blank is the weakest crossword clue, because often it’s trivia instead of working the clue out. There’s nothing wrong with a little trivia; I like the crossword tests knowledge of a wide variety of disciplines. But many of them are either easy or impossible.

Example: Famous Rapper Kendrick ______
Rapper who pimps butterflies
Rapper whose last name rhymes with Cardassian Damar.

All three of these are the same clue. If you don’t know rap music, none of them will help you because you’ve never heard of Kendrick. Although, if you haven’t, pull your head out of the sand, Kendrick is huge.

Cardassian hero Damar.

The best clues are the ones you have to solve. A good one recently was “Maroon, for example.” While I racked my brain for colors, it turned out the answer was “enisle,” as in to banish someone to an island, or maroon them. My favorite part of “Pirates of the Caribbean” is when Jack Sparrow gets enisled. This word is so advanced my writing software, Scrivener, doesn’t recognize it (and it can recognize some high-falutin’ words, like ‘Scrivener’).

This is a great clue because it requires lateral thinking and teaches you a new word. I’d never seen “Enisle” before my genius wife filled it in, and neither had she.*

*That’s how smart she is.