Word: crosswords
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...best murder stories can compete with novels on their own ground. Partisans might instance the tales of Foe, Wilkie Collins and Gaboriau, would certainly mention Dashiell Hammett, "Francis lies," Dorothy Sayers. While admitting that run-of-the-mine murder stories bear as little resemblance to reality as a crossword puzzle and are pieced together with as little regard for grammar and probability, they would point with pardonable pride to such a book as Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night. Gaudy Night is not such a gaudy title as might be supposed. It refers to an Oxford colloquialism, "gaudy" (from Gaudeamus igitur...
...written inside a G, both over a W (since it is The H and writ in G on the W all, the solution is: "The handwriting on the wall"); and interminable alphagrams, charades, transposals, cryptograms, rhomboids, antigrams, palindromes, inverted pyramids and plain puzzles. Outstanding contribution was a "seventeen pyramid" (crossword puzzle whose bottom line has 17 letters, top one). Most useful contribution was a new longest word in the English language, 45-letter "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis," to replace 28-letter "antidisestablishmentarianism." The new one means a kind of silicosis caused by particles of siliceous volcanic dust...
...Entrance Fee" was the pointed boast of the Daily News. It offered a difficult crossword puzzle, did not require readers to buy anything. Half-apologetically it confined the puzzle to small space, did little crowing about its $15,000 prizes. No stranger to contests before it became supreme in circulation in the U. S., the News seemed embarrassed by the necessity of brawling with the vulgar Mirror...
...HOLC, an RFC*-and now we have a CWA. It looks as though one of the absent-minded professors had played anagrams with the alphabet soup. The soup got cold while he was unconsciously inventing a new game for the nation, a game which beats the crossword puzzle-the game of identifying new departments by their initials...
Publisher Elias and Editor Dunbar fashioned a newspaper precisely to the taste of MacDonald, Philip Snowden and countless middle-readers like them. Moreover, they were quick to learn the tricks of circulation come-ons such as lotteries, crossword puzzle contests with cash prizes. In one year the Laborite Herald jumped from 350,000 to over a million. Last year, it passed the News-Chronicle with more than 1,400,000. The battle was so expensive to all concerned that the Newspaper Proprietors Association called a truce. Free gifts were outlawed. Expenditures on canvassing were limited. Fleet Street settled down...