Word: wordplay
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...Playing with numbers is the job of Nobel Prize-winning mathematicians. Wordplay is more like an obsessive hobby, a benign infection, a sweet kink of the mind, a kind of delightful dyslexia, In Wordplay, puzzle creator Trip Payne recalls that, when he moved from Manhattan to Fort Lauderdale a few years ago, he couldn't help mentioning to his new boyfriend that Intercoastal (the word for Florida's inland waterway) is an anagram for Altercation. In the movie, we see veteran constructor Merl Reagle driving past a Dunkin' Donuts shop and saying...
...When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds...
...buddy movie comedies is that they're often about stupid people. Well, I don't want entertainment to show me the lowest common denominator. I want to see people who are smarter, funnier, cleverer than I am. And there are plenty. Most of them, I suspect, are in Wordplay. And if they had a leader, it would be Shortz: President for Life in the Puzzle Principality, King of Crosswords...
...changed since her early days. It's still a 225-space grid, 15 by 15, with 180-degree symmetry and about a sixth of the squares black. The words, of no fewer than three letters, are interlocked. And nothing naughty, please. Reagle, one of the puzzlemakers who appears in Wordplay, mourns that he is forbidden to use vowel-rich words like urine and enema. (I'd guess that somebody somewhere has created R- or X-rated crosswords - English is as at least as rich in obscenities as it is in four-letter words for Irish slave - but I haven...
...innovations didn't please every Times solver. "You are sick, sick, sick," goes one of the letters Shortz reads aloud in Wordplay. Another correspondent is polite but perplexed: "This kvetching thing that's going on, I can't seem to get a grasp on it. 'The kvetcher's cry': 'Oy vey'? I don't get it. How is it used? Is it a Northern thing?" But most puzzlers I know are pleased with his work. More than that: he has given fresh life to their daily preoccupation...