Irrelevant to Mental Development

On December 21, 1913, a journalist by the name of Arthur Wynne started a fad and angered a lot of librarians. Wynne worked for the New York World where he served as editor of the “Fun” section of the newspaper. Looking for something different to liven up the section, Wynne drew inspiration from a variety of word puzzles he’d encountered and came up with something he called a word cross puzzle, involving clues for placing words into blank squares that made up a diamond pattern.

Readers liked it, even when it was later renamed a crossword puzzle. In fact, they liked it so much that they flooded library reference desks to seek answers, which led to the general grumbling of librarians that serious researchers and scholars were being pushed out by frivolous puzzle doers engaged in what the New York Times (home since 1941 to arguably the most famous of gold standard crossword puzzles) called nothing more than “a primitive sort of mental exercise . . . irrelevant to mental development.”

Image by Marjon Besteman from Pixabay

Regardless of the naysayers, Americans were hooked, and as the world grew darker through the start of World War I, these silly little word puzzles became a moment of levity in the midst of the heaviness found throughout the rest of the newspaper pages. Within a very few years, most newspapers across the United States and many throughout the world were regularly printing crosswords.

In 1924 Simon & Schuster began publishing its big book of them, which led to the formation of the Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America, a collection of dedicated crossword enthusiasts who set out to lay down some (much needed?) ground rules that standardized the puzzles.

I honestly didn’t know there was an Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America before I began researching for this post. I also hadn’t known the word cruciverbalist, which in case you ever need to know while working on a crossword puzzle, is the proper term for a crossword enthusiast. I am not a cruciverbalist, but I know a few of them, and if I have more important things to put off, a crossword puzzle isn’t the worst way to waste a little time.

And so it is that on this one hundred and tenth anniversary of the modern-day crossword puzzle, just four days before Christmas when you’re probably starting to panic a little about all those holiday things you need to get done, I decided to gift you with a primitive sort of mental distraction that will be entirely irrelevant to your mental development. You’re welcome.

All of these clues are taken from frivolous information found in posts of Christmas past from this blog’s archives. Of course you can always rush out to your library reference desk, too. Just please don’t tell the librarians I sent you.