SOME PUZZLING THOUGHTS.....

[THE FIRST PUZZLING THOUGHT--I CAN'T GET PICTURES/IMAGES TO COPY HERE. SORRY--TECHNICAL ERRORS TRULY PUZZLE ME.] 

Many years ago, I became intrigued by solving puzzles.

First there were picture puzzles--100 pieces! 500 pieces! 1000 pieces! Clues were in the pictures--if you were supposed to fit all those little pieces together and get a big picture of, say, a box of chocolates, well, you looked for the design of chocolate swirls, and wavy lines of the paper dividers.

Another kind of picture puzzle had only parts of the design, with significant sections left out. The thing that might be an elephant's ear was only a curve--it could be anything! Another twist was the two-color picture--black and white or blue and white; no hints in the change of color.

As I progressed in school, I also progressed in puzzles. After pictures, there were puzzles with NO pictures--puzzles with words only.

I have to confess--some puzzles are still a closed book to me. For example, unless an anagram is practically transparent, it can take me forever to untangle it.

In case you've forgotten what an anagram is, I can give you some simple examples. The word bats is an anagram for tabs. Same letters, different order; making a real word. In mystery stories, the sleuth is always looking at a jumble of 8 or 10 or more letters--and a perfectly good, understandable, word in English, and blurting out a totally different polysyllabic word (using every letter), which (of course) solves the mystery. I'll stand on the sidelines and applaud. Can't do it myself.

Another word puzzle that "puzzles" me is the crostic. (AKA anacrostic) It's a cousin to the crossword, but the clues are written in a separate area, each space is numbered, and those numbered letters are transferred to a larger area (also numbered). Eventually a series of words will be revealed, and you can read a quotation. If my explanation leaves you totally in the dark, search on anacrostic for a better one.

I've tried anacrostics with little success. But this type of puzzle is often used by characters in books and movies--the kind of characters who have super-brains.

Other types of super-brainy characters do their crosswords in ink. Inspector Morse was one of those.

-----

I am well acquainted with crossword puzzles, and have a regular date each morning with the New York Times Mini. It has enough quick answers to keep me coming back every day, and enough tricky clues to stimulate my brain early in the morning. And I've learned a couple of things--some answers keep me in the current usage loop, and others satisfy me that I still possess a working brain.

Another popular type of puzzle is the Word Search. Some people get through a whole book of them in no time, it seems; but I get lost with upside-down-diagonals. so I stick to the traditional crossword.

-----

Recently I came across a type of puzzle that I've not seen much. In an author commentary on parts of a PBS set of mysteries (Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders, Marble Hall Murders) Anthony Horowitz said he likes three kinds of puzzles: anagrams, crostics, and lipograms. Well, we've looked at the first two. How about a gander at lipograms?

A lipogram is writing that leaves out a letter. Here's another one you can type into your preferred search engine and learn more than you ever wanted to know. It's been around since 6th century BCE, but makes reading a challenge sometimes, so it's not popular in my neck of the woods. 

Here's an example from Wikipedia:

 A pangrammatic lipogram is a text that uses every letter of the alphabet except one. For example, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" omits the letter S, which the usual pangram includes by using the word jumps.

-----

I know what you're thinking--Life is puzzling enough (don't get me started), why should I think about these wordy things? Well, why not? Keeps you from getting wound up in your daily life, gives your brain some exercise, and who knows--you may solve a mystery some day because of your puzzle habit!

Blessings,

Thursday's Child