Word: wordplay
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...strange one, considering the solitude in which crosswords are constructed and solved - to meet other puzzle people. At the first tournament, the guest of honor was Margaret Farrar. And in 2005 filmmaker Patrick Creadon brought a crew there to record the competition, which would be the centerpiece for Wordplay...
...Times puzzle under Shortz' aegis has some famous fans, and Wordplay has tracked down most of them. Stewart, attacking a Tuesday puzzle, says, "I'm so confident, I'm gonna do it in glue stick." Dan Okrent, a former TIME executive who was the New York Times' Public Editor, notes that the best crossword solvers are mathematicians and musicians. (This applies especially to cryptic puzzles, a British refinement of the form that was imported to America when Stephen Sondheim created 40 or so for New York magazine in the early '70s. A few years later the cryptic became a regular...
...subway] to go to work in a box. Then we have this wonderful newspaper that's boxy-shaped that has in it this page, which is my favorite page in the whole newspaper. And there are a set of boxes in which you kind of practice the wordplay of this particularly exquisite language...
...Through some clear, clever graphics, all this is spelled out in Wordplay. What you won't learn in the movie is that the puzzle's constructor, Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell - a Butler University professor of, what else, mathematics - had submitted a simpler version to the Times for election Day 1980, with CARTER and REAGAN as the interchangeable words. Maleska turned it down, supposedly asking, "What if John Anderson wins?" (I still shake my head in wonder at Farrell's brilliance, and Maleska's myopia.) Sixteen years later, Farrell revived and revised the idea. Though Shortz typically revises about half...
...Wordplay is every bit as smart as the Times puzzles, puzzlemakers and puzzle solvers. Creadon is a master of the suave segue-as when Okrent observes that "Using Reagle on Tuesday is like using Barry Bonds in Little League," and the film cuts to a clip of Bonds getting struck out by Mussina, leading to the star pitcher's segment...