At the PLA President's Program, New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz gave an appreciative crowd a peek at the world of crosswords, and particularly what makes for good—and bad—solving.
American crosswords have a few ground rules: symmetrical grids with no uncrossed letters, 2-letter words, or repeated words. Beyond that, in a good crossword puzzle, Shortz said the difficulty of a crossword puzzle should come from challenging clues rather than obscure words, and crosswords should contain "lively, colorful vocabulary" with a minimum of archaic, vowel-dense words that are primarily used only in crosswords.
Shortz shared several examples of poor crossword clues that he has had to edit, including "Tries hard" for EXERTS (which would not be interchangable, as one is transitive and the other intransitive), "SAMIAM" as the first line of Green Eggs and Ham (since it is actually the last), and UCLA for "Jim Morrison's alma mater", because, as Shortz said, "I just didn't think it was important enough knowledge.
Shortz noted that the Times crossword frequently makes an impact on Google's tracking of search terms. Oddball concepts that show up in the top 50 search terms can frequently be traced back to the crossword clues.
“At one time I wanted to be a librarian," Shortz proclaimed, connecting his speech back to libraries. "One of the requirements was that you had to be fluent in a second language. I didn’t think I could do that. Anyhow, I found this other thing that I could do.”
He also had a tongue-in-cheek lament for the lack of crossword puzzle books in libraries. "Libraries won't buy books meant to be written in," he declared. "It's not right!"
