The local paper has long had a crossword puzzle, each accompanied by the previous day's solution. Recently they changed: each puzzle would be accomplished by its own solution, inverted.

Bad move. But a newsworthy one. They reported:

What's a 14-letter word for the person who designs the crossword puzzle? ENIGMATOLOGIST.

A 14-letter word for a person who solves the crossword puzzle? CRUCIVERBALIST.

And a 14-letter word for the Tribune's decision to put the answers to the daily crossword puzzle upside-down on the same page?

Hmmm . . . let's not go there.

The cruciverbalists had a lot to say, in all caps and in ink ... . Dozens of them wrote in, mad as hornets. The phrase "dumbing down" was bandied around, along with threats to cancel subscriptions. Editors uttered a four-letter word for mea culpa —OOPS— and quickly reversed themselves.

Here's the article. I thought the funny part was that, instead of just not peaking, they cut up the answers or crossed them out with magic marker.

I'm with you, Kalleh. It's should be easy enough to fold the page in half so they can't see the answers. If they yield to temptation and peek, that's their problem, not the newspaper's. I would suggest putting the answers on the back, rather than at the bottom.

The crossword in our local weekly paper has the answers on a different page. I don't look at it until I finish the puzzle, or as much as I can get, but it's nice to have it available to check my answers. Once I finish a puzzle I throw it away, so to have the answers available a week later (or even the next day) does me no good.

The trouble is that given access to the answers it's psychologically almost impossible not to peek. I do crosswords and have occasionally been given books of them and they always included the answers. No matter how resolved I am to not look after half an hour of being completely stuck the temptation rises unbearably and I inevitably crack.

Even tinman's post contains the telling line

quote:

I don't look at it until I finish the puzzle, or as much as I can get,

At what point do you decide that you have done "as much as you can get"? I've had flashes of inspiration on tricky clues hours after I thought I'd done all I would be able to do. If you don't have the answers you can keep on working. If you do there comes a point where the rising temptation to look outstrips the waning determination to do it by your own efforts.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,