Word puzzles

I adore word puzzles. I'll work almost any sort. D and I used to get the Sunday New York Times and work the Sunday crossword by passing it back and forth. A great way to spend a free Sunday. I miss doing that.

But I am particularly fond of crostics. You've seen them. A quotation is in a grid. There are a number of word clues that fill the grid by assigning each letter in the clue a number and each clue itself a letter. So each open box in the grid contains a letter and a number which correspond to the clues. The cool thing is that the first letters of the clues read together comprise the author and title of whatever the quote is from. This gives you so much more to work with than an ordinary crossword. So I find them easier to complete since there are a multitude of ways to approach them.

So obviously there are constraints on the people who make up a crostic. Like knowing that each clue word is already assigned a first letter. That narrows your choices a bit. And my hat is off to them for being able to construct the thing at all.

Here is the rub, however. There are two things that irritate me no end and make me feel the crostic builder isn't playing fair. These sins amount to giving a clue that cannot be solved. And to me this is like asking who was president of the USA in 1961 and having the answer be Calvin Coolidge.

The first one that really annoys me is being obtuse about a relatively common word and assigning it a meaning it doesn't have. Today the clue was "chew the fat", slang, 4 letters. The answer was "chin". That is wrong on sooooo many levels. First no one says let's go outside and chin about the Packers. I'm going to load Facebook and chin with my friends. I'll give you chin wag as a noun, but chin is not a slang verb for chatting. I don't care that it fit. It's wrong. And obviously, there are many definitions of chin which a solver might recognize as meaning "chin". Pick one.

"Variant Spelling" also raises my blood pressure. I know how words are spelled. I'm pretty good at that, in fact. I do not, however, have a clue about misspelled words. If a word is spelled correctly, there is only one way to spell it. Misspellings, by their very nature, take a myriad of forms. And most of the time these aren't really variants. They are words which almost fit the puzzle. Again pick something that really works.

Come on, play fair. Oh and you Jeopardy contestants out there, quit picking the categories backwards. Or in the middle. Thanks.