Only in Puzzles

In the USA Today crossword puzzle (Saturday last) appears the following clue: “45. Propel a gig.” It is supposed to produce a three-letter formation. That’s an easy one. In goes ROW.  


R



O



W


Trouble was, the upper horizontal word, 4 letters, was clued as “44. Unit of loudness.” And the lower horizontal as “51. Suffix denoting wealth.”  That ROW in 45-Down produced a whole lot of frustrated searching. There seemed to be no real alternative to ROW if the clue is read as referring to a verb. DECIBEL was too long for that unit of sound. Now as for that suffix signifying wealth—we both knew that that was a work-around. The puzzle’s author was left with a meaningless series of letters and thus found those letters in a suffix. Eventually we wrote in SONE for unit of sound —but that, of course, rendered ROW obsolete. And as for that suffix, it came to us that a “millionaire” might work.

S O N E

A

A I R E

These two answers worked splendidly with other words that came from above and continued below but left us no choice but to insert an A between the O above and the R below. Trouble is that “oar” is a noun and not a verb. But. The but in this case is that fact-checking is at least as important a task for crossword puzzle as for political editors—if not more so. So to the dictionary we go. Turns out that “to oar” is a transitive verb. I can “sing” without any further reference (intransitive verb). But I can’t simply oar. I’ve got to oar something—say a gig? And there is a further limit imposed. You can only “oar” in crossword puzzles. When it comes to the real world, the following verses don’t fit the bill:
Oar, oar, oar your boat,Gently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,Life is but a dream.
It’s okay grammatically, if not otherwise. So we crossworded that word into the space erased and sighed a sigh of muted satisfaction.