10 Part I: Crossword Strategies and Brain Benefits
Answering trivia
The trivia clue is often another fairly easy type of clue to answer. That’s
because if you don’t know the answer to a trivia clue, you can probably find it
if you’re willing to use outside resources. For example, you may see a clue like
“2008 best-director brothers” or “Ben Franklin birthplace.” If you don’t know
that the COENS won the 2008 Oscar for their direction of No Country for Old
Men or that Franklin was born in BOSTON, chances are you can find out by
going online or to the right printed resources.
As I explain in the upcoming section “Gathering Your Resources,” some people
refuse to use outside resources because they think doing so is equivalent to
cheating. I respectfully disagree. Using outside resources is part of the process
of increasing your reservoir of knowledge. Ideally, the more puzzles you work,
the more information you’ll have stored in your brain, and the less frequently
you’ll need to turn to books or Web sites for help. But I see no shame in using
these resources when you need them.Punning around
This type of clue can be fairly challenging, depending on how the puzzle con-
structor phrases it. Unlike with a trivia clue, you probably won’t get much
help from outside resources to solve puns; you’ll be left to your own creative
thinking.
The pun clue is often (but not always) followed by a question mark to indicate
that a play on words is at hand. Consider this example: The clue is “What cows
dance to?” and the answer is MOOSIC. (Feel free to groan.)Playing with descriptions
The puzzle constructor can get really creative here because there are endless ways
to describe a single word or phrase. To get the answer ORANGE, for example, you
might see a clue as simple as “Citrus fruit,” which would require that you eliminate
other possibilities (such as lemon, grapefruit, and lime) in order to arrive at the
right answer. But the puzzle constructor could also pose a more oblique clue, such
as “Rhyme eluder,” which would require that you understand he’s referring to a
word that doesn’t lend itself easily to rhymes.