It’s hard to explain to people who don’t do crossword puzzles the exhilaration of solving a particularly difficult puzzle. It must be something akin to the mechanic’s joy in discovering the cause of a recalcitrant problem with a customer’s car and then successfully repairing it. This was my experience today with the New York Times Sunday crossword.
The Sunday puzzles always have a theme, which is hinted at in the title of the puzzle. If you can figure out the underlying concept hidden in the title, you are on the way to figuring out the handful of words or phrases that anchor the rest of the puzzle. Frequently, the title is a play on words and the double entendre becomes evident after you’ve figured out the first anchor clue. But sometimes the underlying concept is not that easy to figure out, as was the case in today’s puzzle.
The title of the puzzle was “Flag Day” and the anchor clues were the colors of national flags. One clue, for example, was “Country with a blue, white and red flag.” The answer is France. Even if you didn’t know or remember national flag colors, you could eventually figure out the answers by solving the clues in the vicinity. So I was pretty confident that would quickly solve this puzzle.
But it soon became apparent that in this puzzle many clues other than the anchor clues would not yield to easy solution. For example, “1959 #1 hit for the Fleetwoods” was only a three-letter word beginning with “m.” Not only had I never hear of the Fleetwoods (not Fleetwood Mac, circa 1967), but I thought it unlikely that they would release a song with a three-letter title. As I continued with the puzzle, I soon realized that there were other three-letter clues that made no sense. Something was fishy.
After about two hours of frustration, I had most of the anchor clues figured out, but only a small portion of the puzzle completed. I knew that I was missing the underlying concept of the puzzle. It had to be about something more than just national flag colors. If I could just figure out one of the seemingly impossible clues, then everything would fall into place.
At this point, my past experience in solving New York Times crossword puzzles came to my rescue. Sometimes, what ends up fitting in an individual box in the puzzle is not a single letter, but several letters which complete the words going both down and across. This had to be the case in this puzzle. One four-letter clue, for example, was “bring up from the past.” I knew it had to start with the letter “d” and the only word I could think of was “dredge”, which is six letters in length. If I put the three letters of the word “red” in the second box, it would fit.
That’s when it hit me. The eureka moment. Alexander Fleming couldn’t have been more exhilarated than me when he realized that something in bread mold was killing staph in his bacterial cultures.
The “red” in the second box of the answer “dredge” corresponded to a flag color. I immediately looked at the unsolved the three-letter clue directly to the left, “Bleaches.” The answer, of course, was whitens, with the word “white” in the first box and the “n” and the “s” in the second and third box. Then I solved the three-letter clue to the left of that, “Not as experienced.” The answer was “greener”, with “green” in the first box and “e” and “r” in the last two.
At this point, I looked at the fourteen-letter word or phrase going across. I knew that three boxes in the middle of the word somehow corresponded to the colors “green”, “white”, and “red” reading from left to right. This is when the second eureka moment came. Imagine, two eureka moments in one puzzle! I felt like Einstein taking a mental ride on a light wave and coming up with the theory of special relativity.
Here was the underlying concept of the puzzle. The three colors of the Italian flag, green, white, and red, stood for the word “Italy”, since those were the colors of the Italian flag. If you put the letters of the word “Italy” into the fourteen-letter word going across, it should fit. The clue was “Modern school keepsakes.” This is what I had come up with up to that point:
_ _ _ (i t a l y) e a r b o o k
The answer to the clue, “modern school keepsakes”, was the phrase “digital yearbook.” The letters “d”, “i”, and “g” fit perfectly in the three down clues and I knew the puzzle had finally yielded its secret. These are some other clues in which country names corresponding to flag colors completed the clues:
“Frances Bean Cobain” (France)
“Acquire land” (Ireland)
“Minimalists” (Mali)
“Sanguine about” (Guinea)
It took me about three hours to complete the entire puzzle. Some puzzles in the past have taken me longer, but none have provided so much revelatory pleasure. By the way, the three-letter 1959 Fleetwoods hit was “Mr. Blue,” with “m” in the first box, “r” in the second”, and the word “blue” in the last box. Live and learn.
