Faithful workers of crossword puzzles already know that a miscellany of table spreads is an olio of oleo.
They know that a Herman Melville novel is always - Omoo.
They know - how could they help but? - that an aloe is a South African lily and medicinal herb, that a century plant is an agave and that "osier" refers, somehow, to any one of a number of related willows.
Crossword puzzles are a four-letter-word world without any four-letter words you wouldn't want your children to hear.
They are a throwback world, where all the epithets are mild Victorian ones - egad and drat.
It is a world stocked to the rafters with flightless birds: the extant variety - emu, or the variant emue - and the extinct one - moa.
The story gets told among crossword buffs of the impeccably dressed New Yorker who boarded his commuter train every evening, opened his Times to the puzzle, pulled out a gold pen and filled in the blocks with nary a pause.
One day, when his stop came, he absent-mindedly left the puzzle on the seat. Green with envy, his fellow commuter-puzzlers snatched it up and discovered pure gibberish. All the time, he had been penning random letters in the blocks with no regard to the clues.
The story is a parable, meant to illustrate something about vanity and trickery, but the real point to the parable is that random letters don't matter. Crossword puzzles are gibberish by their very nature - a geometry of alphabet signs, not a coherent assemblage of words.
Word power? Crossword puzzles don't do that either. Perhaps the well- rounded vocabulary should include some dim awareness that cooled lava is aa, a three-toed sloth is an ai and a bitter vetch is ers, - but "10 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary" this is not.
What's valuable about crossword puzzles isn't that they build skills or character or that they cleave closely to the world of people and events. What's valuable about them is that they run so stridently away from the world as it is.
Forget Moscow and Washington, Paris, Tokyo, London and Rome. Crossword puzzles care only for Ulan Bator - always (blank) Bator - Aleutian islands, Samoan ports.
Forget Democrats and Republicans. Whig fits; so does Tory. A senator's vote is an aye or nay.
Along with a few comic strips and the household-hints columns, crossword puzzles are a lonely outpost in the modern newspaper, a kind of idiot's Shangri-La where Amerinds - Ute and Osage, Cree and Crow - still ride the
plains; where poets still write "slipt" and "ere" and "een"; where a car is a Reo, not a BMW L7, and there are more words for the Emerald Isle than there are Irish to utter them.
