After 37 years of making puzzles, I don’t always get it right

List seven words ending in ALD. Bald is obvious. So is Herald, if you’re reading this column in Sydney. Then what? Give me five more. While you think, let me confess something. Puzzle-makers aren’t always right. For every bonobo I offer, some clever sod will find a galago.

The monkey debate happened last September – Wordwit 11444. That number shocks me. The tally confirms I’ve been making Wordwits for more than 37 years. Now and then I’ll err. Or learn my intended answer has an inadvertent alternative.

Take the bonobo case. The puzzle read: “What monkey, and classic monkey food, each reveal a reversible block of five letters when losing their tail and head respectively?” In my mind, I had bonob/o and b/anana. Easy. Solved. Time for Wordwit 11445. But Mary Anne Hingerty had different ideas.

“I knocked over the puzzle in good time, thinking the monkey was galag/o. But then I was surprised to see a bonob/o appear the next day. I’d thought that it was a chimpanzee, not a monkey. Always enjoy your work, the Armchair Pedant.”

The pedant was spot on. The bonobo is a great ape, not a monkey, despite its modest size – some 30 kilos compared to a 96-kilo gorilla. But taxonomy is taxonomy, and my wording was out. Second to that, there was a second answer, or maybe now the only right one.

Except Mary Anne was barking up the wrong sub-Saharan tree. The galago is a lemur, like a pie-eyed possum, also known as a bush baby. Then again, Mary Anne was right if we count misnomers, since nagapies (its Afrikaans name) translates as night-monkey. By now you realise how dicey puzzling can be as a job, let alone making 11444 of the buggers.

David Plomley, alias DP of crossword fame, caught me out last month. Once more I deemed my answer unique: “What three-letter word – lacking a W – can become a different word when trading any of its letters with a W?” Answer: TOO, yielding woo/two/tow. But DP found a rival trio in SAY: way/swy/saw.

Swy is slang for two-up, after zwei in German, eerily their word for two, part of my answer. Turns out my trio was nothing but a coin-flip. Just as scald, ribald, emerald, piebald and skewbald (any white-spotted animal, perhaps a galago) could gain skald, a Nordic bard.

Sure, you could argue that Viking poets, German two-up and Somali arboreals are hardly lying in a solver’s reach. That said, it was a solver each time who refuted, enriched or qualified the solution I’d imagined.

Michael Halmy, another Wordwit sleuth, pounced on my sporty puzzle in August: “What Olympic event – plus two Olympic sports – all boast a place name as their etymology?” To lend you think-time, let me say that no puzzle-monger is immune from the additional answer.

As a solver of UK crosswords, I often find bonus solutions. Where HULL satisfied one Guardian clue from Paul – “Port – what’s in it?” – so too did CORK. Ditto for a Times clue: Triumphant cry heard in house (5). The answer started with B and ended in O, paving the way for BINGO. But why not BRAVO?

Back to sport, my answers were marathon, rugby and badminton (the latter named after duke’s estate in Gloucestershire – where the maiden cock was shuttled.) Yet Michael had an extra event for the program: “Madison (in cycling) is named after Madison Square Gardens.” Gold medal, Michael, a beautiful addition – in the babushka tradition of clue-crafting, where one answer can always hide another.

davidastle.com

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