Blog Posts

Bizarre and Beautiful Language Phenomena

6/16/2017

Blood Fall, Antarctica. (Photo credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF)

When BBC Travel posted a list of the world's most bizarre natural phenomena in August of last year, I read it with rapture.

Did you know that there's a blood red waterfall in Antarctica?

Or that in northern Canada there's a lake full of frozen bubbles? (Ironically, the bubbles are highly flammable)

Frozen methane bubbles in a northern Alberta lake (Photo credit: @robertharding/Alamy)

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Cryptic Coincidences

3/25/2017

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Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Every once in a while, when I'm solving a puzzle, the strangest feeling comes over me of being simultaneously in the driver’s seat of my thinking as I tackle a cryptic crossword and a powerless passenger as my brain conjures a word from goodness only knows where.

Take the clue 17 Down on this Saturday’s Globe and Mail cryptic crossword:

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Happy Cryptic To Me!

1/27/2017

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It’s my birthday!
As a special present for myself, I carved out a little time every day of the last week and put together a cryptic crossword with personalized clues.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the momentum that good puzzles have and with this one, I’ve paid close attention to the difficulty level of each clue in the hopes that solvers will be pulled along.

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Measure Twice, Cryptic Once

1/9/2017

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Figuring out how to fit everything into the small master bathroom.

Have you ever renovated?

We spent the entire fall in the throes of a major house reno. It was tons of fun, everything worked out well, and I learned a great deal. The most important lesson was the golden rule of construction: measure twice and cut once.

This is smart advice to take literally but it's also a wise principle to apply more generally. Spend a lot of time planning. Review your work. There will be fewer mistakes and when surprises do crop up, you'll be better prepared to deal with them.

Planning carefully is key to producing a good cryptic crossword puzzle, which is why I was so surprised this past Saturday when there was a mistake in Fraser Simpson's cryptic crossword in the Globe and Mail.

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Slip Slidin' a Cryptic

12/27/2016

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My friend Monica, who plays a lot of sports, once told me about the day that volleyball slowed down for her. She had been playing for months but the learning curve so steep that even after all that time, all she could do was scramble to process what was immediately happening. Then one day, just like that, she could suddenly see the game as a whole. She was able to anticipate where the ball would be in a second's time and, therefore, where she needed to be.

About a year ago, I experienced the same thing with cryptic crosswords.

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Sing a Song of Cryptic

12/7/2016

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A few weeks ago, at the Quebec Writer’s Federation Gala, I discovered that I had won the honour of serving as the CBC/QWF Writer-in-Residence for 2017. It’s hugely exciting and I can’t wait to get started blogging about my home, the amazing city of Montreal.

As a kick-off, I was invited to be on the CBC radio show Cinq-a-Six, which is a program in which guests choose songs that have been meaningful to them and talk about why.

Me (centre), in shock, as I accept the Writer-in-Residence position at the QWF Gala.

I was excited to be on the program. But I was also extremely nervous.

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What Rhymes With Cryptic?

11/11/2016

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When I was child, growing up in rural Ontario, I thought there was a letter “r” at the end of the word “spatula”.

Can you guess why?

It’s because that’s how my father, who was born and raised in southern England, pronounced it.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

2/23/2016

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About a month ago, the Sunday New York Time’s crossword puzzle blew the mind of a man named Shane Ryan and he wrote a fantastic article for Paste Magazine explaining why.

The theme of the puzzle was Coriolis force (the inertial effect that causes storms to spin in different directions depending on their hemispheric position) and it is applied with such elegance, you really have to see it to appreciate it.

“Look, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a hopeless nerd,” he writes. “Maybe this doesn’t seem as impressive to you as it does to me. But:”

the amount of pleasure this act of brilliance gives me is difficult to describe. It’s just so perfect, so virtuosic, and yet so playful. It’s the Platonic ideal of a crossword puzzle. And the amount of creativity and brainpower it takes to actually conceive of and create it is astounding to me.

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How The Cryptic Gets In

12/31/2015

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December was a month that started out hectic and only became more frenzied as the days wore on. Our flight left on the 20th and as the date approached, it was starting to look like I wouldn’t get everything crossed off my “to do” list before boarding. For the most part I didn’t mind but one item that stung was my annual Christmas Cryptic, a personalized puzzle I build for my family every year.

Ostensibly, the Christmas cryptic is my gift to the family. Really, it’s a gift that the family gives to me. I savour their coos of excitement as my parents, sister and husband first glimpse the grid. I smile ear to ear as they retreat to the armchairs and couches with mugs of coffee, ballpoint pens, and the puzzle. “Which one are you working on now?” I pester excitedly. “Have you got 12 Across yet?”

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Partners in Cryptic

9/10/2015

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One of the things I love most about practicing yoga is the absence of comparison. When I attend a class, there may be twenty or thirty other people there, but we're all working at our own pace. We have to: our bodies are all different. We are different ages and weights. We have different flexibilities and different amounts of muscle. Different things have happened to us over the course of our lives, and that changes how we move.

When my sister, my parents, my husband and I do the cryptic crossword on weekend reunions at my parents place, we all retreat to our separate spaces to dive into the puzzle. We work at our own paces and (unless someone accidentally cries out an answer in a fit of enthusiasm) respect one another's individual puzzle solving. In that respect, it’s a bit like being in a yoga class: we’re all working towards the answers in our own way.

Having someone call out "You don't have 17 Across yet? But it's so EASY!" would be akin to someone in a yoga class calling out "What do you MEAN you can't do full lotus position? It's SO EASY!”

It would be judging someone else’s practice by the standards of one’s own experience.
And what’s the point of that?

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