#51 | crossword puzzles
Just another milestone in the journey to becoming my mother.
A few months ago I stumbled across a TikTok video of a guy solving the New York Times crossword puzzle. No cuts, no edits, just a start-to-finish video of him completing the puzzle. I don’t know what possessed me but I watched all 40+ minutes of it. I had no idea who this person was & I had never done a crossword puzzle before, but isn’t that the beauty of the algo?
I enjoyed the wholesome nature of it so much that I went back the next day & the day after that to watch each day’s video. He starts every one the same way, announcing that he’s “learning to do the big New York Times crossword puzzle” and then he gets right to solving.
By the third day of me watching this, something shifted. This man, who seems very pleasant, began to bother me. He didn’t know some answers that seemed very obvious to me. The man has a gap in his pop culture knowledge! He didn’t know what an EGOT was!1 And the most egregious crime of all, he kept misspelling the answers that he did know, so they appeared wrong & caused problems later on!!2
I found myself wanting to yell at him through my screen, as though he was performing live in my living room & I was not watching a pre-recorded video of a puzzle he already solved.
As I’ve aged & matured, the urge to yell at my phone tends to prompt me to ask myself, “What am I actually mad about here, and can I do something about it?” The answers to those questions were 1) I wasn’t actually mad, I’m just embellishing for storytelling impact; and 2) I can try the puzzle myself!
One thing that came as a surprise to me when watching this stranger’s videos is that there are no rules to crossword puzzles. If you don’t know the answer to a clue & you can’t figure it out based on context, you can just… look it up. I think I’ve gone 37 years just assuming that people who did crosswords knew all of the answers already; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that I could use the internet to assist but man, that was a lightbulb moment!
Armed with this revelation, I paid for a New York Times Games subscription & began my foray into the world of crossword puzzles. I would complete my puzzle every morning, and then pop over to TikTok to check how long it took my inspiration-turned-unwitting nemesis to see which of us had won the day.
(I only did this for a few days before realizing how bizarre it was, don’t worry.)
Since that fateful October day, I’ve completed every daily puzzle & dug into the archives. I learned what the REBUS key meant3, and which days were trickier than others (looking at you, Wednesday & Thursday 👀). I’ve learned that I have a very large gap when it comes to the names of famous actors & musicians from any year prior to 2010 but I do ok with clues that play on words or contain idioms.
My strategy is to fill out as much as I can off the top of my head in the first round, then go back through a second time to see if anything else makes sense with other words filled in. On my third time through the clues, I allow myself to look up straightforward answers, like the name of a celebrity I don’t know or a country’s capital.
After that, it’s kind of a free-for-all — sometimes enough of the puzzle is filled in that I can figure out the rest, sometimes I need to keep looking things up. Every once in awhile I look at the NYT explainer article that includes a few answers, but that usually only happens on the trickier days.
My next goal is finish a Sunday puzzle without using the puzzle checker; I thought I had it this week but couldn’t figure out where the error was… it was only one square though, so I feel like I’m close!
ICYMI: Recent Posts to Catch Up On
From the Archives: Older Posts I Still Stand By
EGOT is an acronym that stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony and is used to describe a person who has won all 4 awards. It is a very impressive feat that only 21 people have achieved, and in no way do I expect this term to be universally known unless you’re a theater or awards show nerd like me
Honestly, being very good at spelling probably counts for 20% of my success in learning to do crossword puzzles
This took me awhile to figure out but it lets you type more than one letter in a square. Tricky! More here.