Look It Up

It is arguable that Christmas Tree gangs should be banned

from attending the Edinburgh Christmas Fair

Don't look now, but Christmas is coming. Help! It's the same every year, though, isn't it? An entirely predictable, non-wobbly calendrical event (unlike that big tease, Easter) that somehow always manages to take you by surprise, as if somehow, if only you ignored it with sufficient conviction, this year it might not happen. Because, however you look at it, and whether you "celebrate" it or not, Christmas is always  a bit of a challenge, unless you're seven years old or the sort of adult male whose seasonal domestic contribution is restricted to keeping out of the way and staggering home late more often than usual. I recall the frustration of our many overseas students, for example, paying substantial fees and yet locked out of all university facilities from Christmas Eve until after New Year. So much for the Wise Men from the East... Sorry, guys, we're closed. Put the gold through the letterbox, but leave the frankincense and myrrh on the step [1].

In the Days of Analogue, one way of alleviating the tedium of those long, dark nights confined with your extended family was to play games. Ever had to chase cut-out paper fish across the living-room carpet with a rolled up newspaper, or tried to play hide-and-seek in a house with no hiding places worthy of the name? Only then can you fully appreciate the pure solitary joy of reading a book or, as an adult, quietly getting drunk and pretending to be unconscious. Of course, as well as the more lively, physical games there were also board games, ranging from the moronic to the baroque in their demands on your intellectual faculties. But there is really only one reason for most board games to exist at Christmas, and that is to corral hysterically over-excited young relatives, unfamiliar with the festive domestic layout, into a single location where the damage to furniture and fittings can be minimised. Mind that tree, you little ... cousins!

Personally, I've never really been turned on by games or puzzles. Even as a child, the idea of a round of Monopoly or snakes and ladders was never my idea of a fun way to spend the evening. I was always rather more interested in the look of the board and the gaming pieces than the game itself, and have certainly spent rather more time admiring the curves, planes, and moulding of chessmen than actually playing chess, which, frankly, I found and still find utterly baffling. The very idea of thinking several moves ahead, including the anticipation of your opponent's counter-moves, stimulates some part of my brain that, far from exciting me, gives me a profound headache. It's not something I'm proud of, I simply know my limits. Oh, look, you win again: I'll put the kettle on. Do we have any paracetamol?

I have attempted to master a few card games which are more complex than snap (difficult enough, if your attention is constantly snagged by the elegance and intricacies of playing card design). Poker and bridge, for example, simply because it seems antisocial to spoil the fun of others by refusing to play, however badly, and, naturally, there's nothing a decent card player enjoys more than to point out the idiotic way you have just lost a winning hand to their fistful of rubbish. You're welcome! I spent one memorable holiday in the late 1970s touring France and Spain trapped in a car with three keen bridge players. Rarely has anyone filled the role of "dummy" so well. Listen, you play out the hand, I'll get the drinks in [2].

Solitary games don't hit the spot for me, either. Sudoku? Forget about it! And the challenge of, say, a crossword has never been one to which I have felt the need to rise. Although, recently, I have taken a reluctant interest in the full-on cryptic crossword, which – with its traditions, explicit and implicit rules, and austere satisfactions – is a peculiarly British institution, not unlike our unwritten constitution, or the game of cricket. The civil servant who can finish the Times crossword during the morning commute, casually leaving the paper with its pencilled-in solutions on the train seat, is a figure of legend. But, as with chess, the mindset required to solve a cryptic clue is deeply alien to me. I love language: truly, madly, deeply. To regard words as assemblages of letters, to be chopped up and re-arranged to form other words, is like regarding a person as a fascinating but interchangeable assemblage of organs. Which, I suppose, is precisely how a surgeon must come to see people: in Eliot's memorable words, he sees the skull beneath the skin.

Which, dammit, now sounds to me like a moderately cryptic clue... A spider sees the skull beneath the skin (7 letters). Why? Because recently an old friend who is a crossword enthusiast has inveigled me into helping him out with some of the clues in the Times Literary Supplement crossword, under the mistaken impression that I have advanced knowledge of literary matters. Whereas I am, in reality, a retired professional metadata surfer. As Samuel Johnson said, "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries." [3] Well, I suppose I do have a little literary knowledge, but what I really know is where and how to look for more.

Sometimes these TLS clues are not so much cryptic as oblique: it's just a question of spotting the allusion. For example: "Clergyman's legendary pseudonym (9)". Answer: INGOLDSBY. Now, I doubt that even very well-read people, these days, would get that one unaided by Google. Who today, for heaven's sake, has read The Ingoldsby Legends? Or is aware that "Thomas Ingoldsby" was the pseudonym of a clergyman, Richard Harris Barham? It reeks of a stuffy kind of literariness – all pipe smoke and tweed jackets – that was already obsolete by the 1960s. But, as a clue, it's still little more than a look-up job: the most challenging clues are those that deploy a fiendish ingenuity that rips language apart and stitches it back together into a Frankensteinian simulacrum.

Consider this recent TLS clue: "Service area crossed by Follett's drunken agent (6)". Now, as a sentence, it makes superficial sense. We know what a "service area" is, we can guess that thriller writer Ken Follett is being invoked, and that one of his books may well include an agent who is a drinker. Much googling ensues, but with little result. There are no obvious Follett novels with an alcoholic protagonist, no useful synonyms for "service area". But the experienced solver will have been alerted by the words "crossed by". Such innocent formulations often indicate a mashup of some kind; an anagram, a concatenation, a topping and tailing, or some other piece of word butchery.

So, now consider the answer: it is ... KERNAN. Your considered response to this may be WTF?, as was mine. But here's how it works:

"service" = RN (abbreviation for the Royal Navy, the Senior Service);
"area" = A (a standard algebraic abbreviation);
"Follett" = KEN.
Now apply scissors and paste.

"Kernan", as you may or may not recall, is the drunk who falls down the stairs in "Grace", one of the short stories in James Joyce's Dubliners, and who also features in Ulysses. He is a salesman, thus an "agent"; well, kinda sorta, maybe. So it seems there is no "service area", and the "agent" is not Ken Follett's at all. [4] Which I find less than satisfying. Indeed, what baffles me most about this kind of puzzle is that the treasure chest, after all that map-reading and all that strenuous digging, is often empty. To successfully reverse-engineer the clue may reveal absolutely nothing at all about anything: it has merely demonstrated that your ingenuity is commensurate with that of the setter. Unless of course you managed to get there without resort to the Web or a decent reference shelf, smugly pencilling in KERNAN as the train pulled into Waterloo station, in which case what it reveals is that you have an improbably well-stocked mind as well as quite possibly some kind of personality disorder.

Which, as a retired professional metadata surfer, leads me to some melancholy thoughts on the decline of the printed reference book. If retail shops are struggling in the face of the competition from online shopping, the traditional, well-researched and authoritative work of reference has all but vanished beneath the wheels of the Web juggernaut. Where once there were shelves of atlases, dictionaries, concordances, bibliographies, companions, and encyclopaedias to accompany fields of study as broad as "everything" or as narrow as "Frisian folklore", now there is simply a blinking cursor in the box marked "Search". Which is fine – more than fine, it's fantastic – apart from the fact that it might as well be labelled "Pot Luck", given that most people have no idea how to frame a question which will deliver the answer they need, and must settle for the first few answers that a search engine's algorithms push to the top of an impossibly long and unsorted list of vaguely relevant results. Worse, the popular search engines discourage enquirers from applying any rigour to their search, as offered by the use of filters, wildcard characters, stemming, and the like. You press the button, we do the rest; trust us! Google, for example, doesn't exactly encourage the use of its "advanced search" (try finding it, for a start) or conventional search logic: yes, Google does offer Boolean-style operators, if you know how to use them.

One of my most treasured Christmas presents was a large dictionary, given by an uncle when I was about twelve. I hadn't asked for one, but it turned out to be just what I needed at just the right time. I sat poring over it for hours, finding it as hard to put down as any page-turning thriller. Rather like the multi-volume encyclopaedia I had begun to accumulate on my eighth birthday, it set out, in a systematic and authoritative way, an entire field of knowledge. I didn't need to know every word in it, I simply needed to know how to use it and, above all, when to use it, which meant activating those invaluable twin faculties: the desire to know – curiosity – and the willingness to acknowledge my ignorance.

Now, you, like me, will often have presumed to know something – the meaning of a word, say – and passed over it often enough subsequently for that presumption to have solidified into "knowledge". We are, understandably, not always curious or willing enough to question our own easily-won certainties. There's a nice passage in Aldous Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow, in which a poet at a 1920s house party explains his misunderstanding of the word "carminative":

"It's a word I've treasured from my earliest infancy," said Denis, "treasured and loved. They used to give me cinnamon when I had a cold–quite useless, but not disagreeable. One poured it drop by drop out of narrow bottles, a golden liquor, fierce and fiery. On the label was a list of its virtues, and among other things it was described as being in the highest degree carminative. I adored the word. 'Isn't it carminative?' I used to say to myself when I'd taken my dose. It seemed so wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that glow, that–what shall I call it?–physical self-satisfaction which followed the drinking of cinnamon. Later, when I discovered alcohol, 'carminative' described for me that similar, but nobler, more spiritual glow which wine evokes not only in the body but in the soul as well. 

But then, having used the word in a poem ("And passion carminative as wine...") he decides finally to look it up. Only to discover it actually means "makes you fart" (or, "a small English-German dictionary" having been the only reference source readily to hand, Windtreibend).

It happens. I'm fond of asking people what colour they think a "livid scar" is (go on, look it up), not least because I myself felt betrayed by that word when I finally had cause to look it up. But, once you have recovered from your embarrassment – and assuming you are not that strangely well-informed man on the morning train to Waterloo – such epiphanies are an opportunity to acknowledge, if not necessarily achieve, the sort of humility before the Unknown that is the hallmark of the great enquiring minds. In the famous words attributed to Isaac Newton (not a man noted for his humility in everyday life):

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Or, as that other far-from-humble man, Samuel Johnson, responded, when asked how on earth he could have defined "pastern", wrongly, as "the KNEE of a horse" in his dictionary: "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance."

I am shortly to depart for our own little house party in Dorset over Christmas, where the carminative properties of various traditional festive consumables, not excluding wine, will doubtless be thoroughly tested. Games may well be played, too (my son is unaccountably keen on board games), so I may yet have to pretend to be unconscious, or at least too absorbed in a book to be worth disturbing. It is unlikely that I will not be posting again before the New Year but nonetheless possible, rural Wi-Fi being what it is. A lot also depends on how unconscious or absorbed I become. So, just in case, allow me to wish you a very enjoyable [insert Solstice Celebration of choice] and many good things to look forward to in 2019! Here in Brexit-bound Britain, sadly, Things can only get more Interesting... I'm afraid April 1st could be a very strange and very foolish day indeed, this coming year.

A reminder of winters past...

A Hind's Daughter, by Sir James Guthrie (1883)

Scottish National Gallery

1. Equally predictably, every year some comedian will demand, rhetorically, "But what the hell is myrrh, anyway?" Really? So why not ask Santa for a dictionary next year, dimwit?
2. A task I enjoyed, as a large part of that holiday was spent in the Basque Country, where I often found – to my unaccustomed delight – that I was the tallest man in the bar.
3. That quotation (from Boswell's Life)  has an oddly anachronistic feel, as if Johnson is talking about popping into the local public library and scanning the summaries and blurbs printed on the back of the books, but of course by "back" he means "spine" and by "library" he means either someone's personal collection of books or that of some private institution like a club.
4. Here is an expert's account: The surface of  this clue suggests a story about the author Ken Follett and his inebriated (and/or hopefully non-litigious) literary agent on a motorway journey, perhaps. Cryptically, however, it is a charade within a container, with the clear definition, "drunken agent" – a reference to Joyce's character, KERNAN, the answer. The charade is RN = Royal Navy ("service") + A ("area" -- maths) and that is contained within KEN, the author Follett's forename. The containment is indicated by the word "crossed". RNA is 'crossed' by KEN. The "'s" at the end of Follet is the link word between wordplay and definition. Cryptically, it stands for 'is': [this wordplay] is (the same thing as) [this clear definition], while in the surface it is a possessive marker. So the structure of this clue is: contained charade / link word / definition.