MacGougan at Large

Notes on Word Puzzles - 2

Puzzle Custody

Imagine, if you will, a married couple composed of two puzzlers. How will they balance their need to solve puzzles with their need to stay married?

There are three potential strategies:

• Working together on the same puzzles

• Working independently on the same puzzles

• Working on different puzzles.

Working together on the same puzzles is bound to create conflict. This is related to the fact that marriage counselors don’t typically recommend that couples hang wallpaper in a bathroom together.

Working independently on the same puzzles creates competition. On any particular type of puzzle, one member of the couple is likely to be a little more successful than the other - potentially leading to hubris for the regular winner and resentment for the regular loser.

For the particular couple I have in mind, working on different puzzles seemed like the safest approach. So we had to negotiate Puzzle Custody.

I got Crosswords, Acrostics, Cryptic Crosswords, Jumbline, and KenKen. I get them from the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, apps and books.

Linda got Spelling Bee, Connections, Sudoku, Wordle, Strands, and first dibs on miscellaneous other puzzles. She gets them from the New York Times, except for Sudoku, which she gets from books. This may be a different category altogether, but she also got jigsaw puzzles.

I want to stop here for a moment to remark on something we all take for granted that is actually kind of weird. The primary channels that most of us get our puzzles from are news organizations. What’s that about?

• A news organization exists to enable its audience to be well-informed and therefore better able as citizens to engage constructively with the world.

• A puzzle-delivery organization exists to take people’s minds off of whatever is happening in the world and provide a compelling alternative to engaging with the world.

Getting our puzzles from the New York Times is sort of like going to Starbucks for sleeping pills.

Back to our puzzle custody arrangement. Approximately once a year, Linda will ask me to take a look at a Connections puzzle that she’s stuck on. Sometimes I can help and sometimes I can’t. When I can help, this is understood by us both as relating to the value of a fresh set of eyes and not any Connections superiority on my part. If I had custody of Connections, heaven only knows how often I’d come to her for help.

Of course, I’d say this even if I did harbor delusions of Connections superiority. I don’t want to lose my annual turn.