This year, I've picked up the art of cryptic crosswords. It's been a lot like how I imagine learning a fighting game feels. It is very gratifying to learn how to approach them, but to get there requires a lot of perseverance and a lot of learning arcane slang and weird tricks. Did you know that the phrase "very good" can hint at the letters "PI", short for "pious" in 19th century British slang? Oh, you don't know your 19th century British slang? How embarrassing.
I've been trying to set my own cryptic crosswords as I learn. It's been fun to make my own really irritating word puzzles. Trying to read words as just strings of characters takes a lot of effort, but when you can break a word down into component parts and make a clue out of them, it's very pleasing. It's even better when that clue looks like a coherent sentence. Here's my favourite clue I've set, from this puzzle:
XXX MODEL: HOT, FILTHY, TOPLESS (6)
The solution:
The answer to the clue is "thirty". The idea is that the "XXX" is a definition, being the Roman numerals for thirty. The rest of the clue is the wordplay. "MODEL" translates to T as in the Model T car. The colon can be disregarded, as you usually (but not always) do with punctuation in a cryptic clue. "HOT" gives H as in the abbreviation you might find on, e.g., a hot water tap. "FILTHY" gives you the word "dirty", except it's "TOPLESS" so you remove the first letter, leaving "irty". T + H + IRTY = THIRTY.Now that I write it out I realise how annoying it is, but I'm still very pleased with it.
Anyway, I'm writing about this because I've been trying to read "weapons in a planetarium" as a cryptic clue, and it almost works, but not quite, and it's upsetting me. If it was "weapon in a planetarium" it might work as a hidden word clue with the answer NET, because it's hidden in plaNETarium and the net was a weapon used by gladiators, Or you can read it as a double definition which breaks down as "weapons" and "in a planetarium", in which case you could try STARS referring to both throwing stars and the stars of the galaxy. But I think both definitions are too much of a stretch. I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of the day trying to make it work.
