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20051026 Wednesday October 26, 2005

Things I wish I could do, #4

I wish I could do cryptic crossword puzzles

All the pieces are there. I have a reasonably large vocabulary, I enjoy wordplay, puns, silly humor. I understand the various types of clues, having read several books about how cryptic puzzles work. But I still can't do the darn things, no matter how much I practice.

( Oct 26 2005, 07:21:16 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/terryh/entry/things_i_wish_i_could2
Comments:

Yes you can do them! What you don't have is enough time to spend on them with all the other things going on in your life! When you retire however, they become ESSENTIAL to stop the grey matter from disappearing altogether -- Keep at it!

Posted by Jill on October 26, 2005 at 11:38 PM PDT #

Same for me Terry. I have read books and I still can't follow how to solve these puzzles. I have even bought books of crosswords and looked at the answers and tried to analyse how the answer appeared. The ones I can spot are anagrams. Can't be good at everything.

Posted by Paul Humphreys on October 27, 2005 at 03:53 AM PDT #

Crosswords go with scrabble and word jumble. There is a mental skill involved in finding words from a pattern of letters. Mostly we read words in lumps and phonemes without reading the individual letters. So normal skill with words won't help much. I think you need special practice with letter scrambling types of games to be really good at crosswords. I enjoy crosswords a little, but I don't really consider my self good at them. My wife Lisa likes to play word jumbles and scrabble a lot, but I don't really enjoy those.

Posted by Chris Quenelle on October 27, 2005 at 11:23 PM PDT #

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