Following Orders: Playing Fast and Loose with Language and Letters

“The Penny Drops”: Investigating Insight Through the Medium of Cryptic Crosswords

“…It is not always obvious which part of the clue is fulfilling what role, and there is often no clear division between the two parts (Friedlander and Fine, 2016 ). Even the “definitional” element of the clue might be obliquely or whimsically referenced, consciously exploiting ambiguities such as grammatical form, phrasal semantics, homophones, synonyms, and roundabout expressions (Cleary, 1996 ; Aarons, 2015 ; Friedlander and Fine, 2016 ). The clue type also has to be identified and interpreted.…”

“…Each cryptic crossword clue is thus a tricky linguistic puzzle using non-literal interpretations of deconstructed clue components in a “truly slippery and fundamentally ambiguous” fashion (Aarons, 2012 , p. 224), stretching the conventions of everyday speech at all levels of structure and context (Aarons, 2015 ). The misdirection is deliberate: the surface reading of the clue evokes our tacit knowledge of language to suggest a plausible, yet unhelpful, interpretation of the clue (the “red herring”), setting up a constraint which must be resolved for progress to be made (Aarons, 2015 ; Friedlander and Fine, 2016 ). Once accomplished, the “Aha!” experience is triggered: this is termed the “Penny Dropping Moment” or “PDM” by crossword solvers (Friedlander and Fine, 2016 ).…”

“…Once deconstructed in this manner, there is no requirement for the cryptic components to make further sense as a coherent whole: the beguilingly smooth surface reading of the clue is typically abandoned in favor of a potpourri of dissociated cryptic fragments, each serving a quite different purpose entirely ungoverned by word-order, grammatical or orthographic considerations (Pham, 2016 ). In this way cryptic crosswords can be seen as a type of “non- bona fide communication” (Aarons, 2015 , p. 357): the solver understands that the normal rules of communication must be temporarily suspended (just as they are required to suspend disbelief at a magic show), and that the clue itself is simply a vehicle for the intellectual challenge of solving the clue.…”

“…Although there is general agreement that the clues have to be fairly constructed (i.e., unambiguously solvable), there are no hard-and-fast guidelines as to what the rules of engagement are (Aarons, 2015 ; Friedlander and Fine, 2016 ), leading to an almost infinite number of innovative ways to exploit the “versatile and quirky English language” (Connor, 2013 ). Nevertheless, there is some consensus over a number of basic mechanism types, and a range of “Teach-Yourself” primers exist (Friedlander and Fine, 2016 : see also now the on-line solving channel - Anthony and Goodliffe vlog, n.d. ).…”

“…Linguistic jokes share many characteristics with cryptic crosswords, including deliberate misdirection (Aarons, 2015 ), and—although only rarely used as such in the lab—jokes have been identified as a type of insight puzzle (Gick and Lockhart, 1995 ; Ramachandran, 1998 ; Robertson, 2001 ; Kounios and Jung-Beeman, 2009 ; Kozbelt and Nishioka, 2010 ; Amir et al, 2015 ) on the basis of the suddenness and rapidity of the solution, the lack of “feeling-of-warmth,” the pleasant feelings evoked at the moment of understanding, and the feeling of certainty in the correctness of the solution. A punning joke is typically based on two alternative interpretations of a scripted feed-line, which are both plausible in some sense, however absurd, “until the punchline, which highlights the initially less obvious one, and reveals the other to be a dummy, designed intentionally to mislead the listener” (Aarons, 2015 , p. 352).…”