Think Inside the Box

I have a confession to make: I am a crossword junkie.

Sure, I know plenty of people who do crosswords. There are the people who do the Los Angeles Times crossword published by Spectator in order to cut the boredom of classes. Then there are the people who do the Sunday New York Times puzzle, just to prove that they can. Finally, there are the acrostic lovers like my father, masochists who know the patterns so well they can do the puzzles in their sleep.

My problem is far worse.

I do the New York Times daily, the Los Angeles Times in class, the Washington Post and Newsday online, Sky Magazine (regrettably, a monthly puzzle) on the Delta Shuttle, People in doctors' offices, and the Boston Globe Magazine and the Newburyport Daily News from the comfort of my mother's kitchen. I am frequently wrong and even more frequently duped by difficult puzzles, but this doesn't keep my obsession in check.

It didn't start out this way. I used to sneak clues in to my parents' puzzles when they weren't looking. I wrote in pen, got most of the clues wrong, and incurred their wrath when they had to change "e" to "a," "chuck" to "shank," and so forth. By the time I hit high school, I was an expert at the local newspaper puzzles, knocking them off with relish every afternoon. A friend of mine deemed me the Crossword Queen, after watching me zip through a puzzle he had been puzzling over (no pun intended) for hours. To his credit, he's not a practiced puzzler and for him the lingo just wasn't there. For, as any chronic crossworder knows, part of being a good solver is practicing, since the language almost always repeats itself.

But what is most interesting about the crossword craze is that crossword puzzles are an inherently American cultural force. On Dec. 21, 1913, New York World published its first crossword puzzle, composed by a man named Arthur Wynne. By the 1930s, almost every American newspaper featured a crossword puzzle, and only later did these puzzles cross the Atlantic and become a staple of European newspaper fare as well. These word and trivia games have become so popular that they have provoked both a national puzzle-solving trend (creating, in the process, addicts like myself) as well as a fair amount of research and writing on the subject.

"A crossword puzzle," New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz wrote in an April 2001 article entitled "How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle," "is a battle between the puzzle maker and editor on one side and the solver on the other. But unlike most battles, both sides here have the same goal--for the solver to win. A perfect puzzle may put up lots of resistance. It may, in fact, seem impossible at first. Ideally, though, in the end the solver should triumph and think, ëOh, how clever I am!'" Perhaps this self-affirmation--oh, how clever I am--was my motivation for keeping at it, for plugging away at those tiny boxes, for ignoring the news of the newspaper in which I had invested so much ink.

Or perhaps my motivation lay in the need to escape the news, to celebrate being an American without getting bogged down in the slimy politics of America. "Here [in crossword puzzles]," Burkhard Bilger wrote in "The Riddler," an article in the March 4 issue of the New Yorker, "every problem has a solution, and pain, disease, violence, and despair never make it to the grid." It's a way of being patriotic without being a patriot, a way of celebrating national identity without announcing to the world: I am an American. I am not much of a flag-waver and I have no real connection to red, white, or blue, but I do pledge allegiance to those black and white squares that provide me with so much pleasure and so much pain.

Like apple pie and baseball, like the Super Bowl and Woodstock, crossword puzzles are part of our American heritage. With all this talk of patriotism, of keeping the American spirit alive, perhaps it is the crossword puzzle that can save us. Forget about the flags. Forget about Irving Berlin. Forget about reading the international section of the newspaper. Maybe patriotism is as close to us as the arts section of The New York Times.

Hannah Selinger is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and comparative literature.