Playing Around with Words

I have never played golf.  Or, to put it more accurately, I have nearly played a round of golf once when a friend of mine persuaded me to accompany him round the verdant acres of a North Hampshire Nine hole pitch and putt course.  The fact is, though, that I was sent back to the club house in disgrace after my score reached treble figures on about the third fairway. However, I am an avid cruciverbalist, and golf provides an endless supply of answers to cryptic clues.  So, while I have no sense of what any of them refer to, I am acutely aware of words like Driver, Iron, Brassie, Mashie Niblick and Baffy Spoon. Where would I be without Tees, (The Course of a Northern River) and Greens (This course is all cabbage) ?

It occurs to me how much of my vocabulary is made up of words that I need for crosswords but crop up nowhere else in my daily speech.  I know the words used in many lesser known sports, including horse racing, billiards and croquet.  On the other hand, sports I know well, like cricket, provide simple everyday words like “on” “off” “in” “out” “leg” “run” which form parts of longer answers crossword. Oh, and footballers are like babies in that they are always dribbling.

The crossword solver (cruciverbalist) must have at his or her disposal the names of Rivers of the world and know that there is a Hampshire trout stream that can be a bit of a Trial.  Rivers are also “Bankers” or Flowers”. It’s important to know the workings of engines, the names of animals and birds and the finer points of astronomy (Hollywood actors that are seen out at night).  Money can be “bread” (Use your loaf to earn a living) or “brass” and so on and son.  

Then there are the hidden components of other words that occur like different colour lego bricks to be clipped together into new words.  Scotsmen are usefully “Ian” or “Mac”. The letters of the Greek alphabet occur in their English form “tau” and “rho”. It’s important to know that “Four” is written as “iv” and “fifty” is “l”. A French or German article is “le” or “der”. Fish are generally “ling”. Consider how many times this aquatic creature ends up on the end of your gerunds. But has anybody ever seen a Ling or caught one? Then there are common abbreviations:   “that is” is “ie” and “thus” is “sic”.  These lego pieces can all be assembled into longer words.   To help you along there is a convention that the clue is in two parts.  Both parts leading  to the same answer as a sort of cross check mechanism.

So now you should know enough to solve the clue “Club money that is short.”

However, on top of all that one has to spot and solve anagrams and words hidden within other words.  There are acrostic phrases and allusions.  It’s all good, endless, harmless fun.

 The thing is, I need to know about these words and what they imply as crossword clues but I don’t need to know what they actually Mean in the real world. 

To those who study these things, this is the division between “semantics”( the meaning of words) and “semiotics” (the signs that indicate the words in the first place) and through that little gap  we can get to the real nitty gritty of writing.  Through this little rift, writers can see a different world  of analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism. All those things that make writing more than merely reporting on a two-dimensional world in two-dimensional language. Words are more than their meanings. They have powerful, trailing shadows of other aspects of the world we live in. It is how James Joyce can write one of the most sublime books beyond meaning and, setting aside the ineptitudes of Dan Brown, how we can worship at the altar of the dadaists and surrealists and puzzlers. It is, of course, this gap that gives us poetry.

I wallow in these ideas in my writing so much so that my latest novel “The Last Train to Norrköping” is a sort of homage to cruciverbalist/novelist Colin Dexter with verbal and visual clues sprinkled crossword-like through the text.  It may be something that could kickstart a new direction in your writing.  Give the words a good whack and let me know whether the meaning finishes on the green or in the rough.  Good golfing.

Oh, and the answer to the clue is, of course, “Brassie”