THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21716, 3 February 1934, Page 10

THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE

Discussing the vogue of the crossword puzzle, the Glasgow Herald says:— ' 'What came to us —almost 10 years ago now! —as a crude trans-maritime importation has been refined and moulded to a thing of many subtleties and many excellences. It has been adapted to the atmosphere of the educated British, mind. It tests our scholarship no less than our wits; it stirs deep in that agglomeration of miscellaneous information that we call general knowledge. In its clues things have long ceased to be what they seem. If allusion and quotation have, as the writer of a recent treatise on these subjects lamented, gone out of literature and oratory, they have found sanctuary in ihe columns below the diagram of the crossword. There, too, the anagram has been given a sensible object and the pun a purpose. And all have, been marshalled in the end to a mathematical perfection. Providing all these things, the crossword has become a thing of which no intelligent reader need be shamed. It has become a relaxation for the busy healthy and an occupation for the weary sick. It knows no season, and can lull the mind to summer drowsiness or stir it to winter activity. And think of the feeling of satisfaction that accompanies a puzzle solved, a satisfaction in which pleasure at the thought of 'something attempted, something done' rubs shoulders with this other — that one is every whit as clever as the sly dog who devised this test of wits. What more than this last could anyone reasonably demand?"