Readers often tell me that when they can’t solve a crossword clue, they sleep on it and hey presto! In the morning the answer suddenly springs out at them.
Writer John Steinbeck discusses this phenomenon “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of [more…]
This article appeared in Woman’s Day 14/3/2012:
Get the Kids Cross-Training
We’ve all heard doing the Woman’s Day crossword may help ward of dementia, but did you know the crusical age to engage your brain is between six and 40?
Researchers at the University of California surveyed 65 adults with an average age of 76 and found [more…]
Hula hoops, beehive hairdos, pet rocks, lava lamps and the Brady Bunch all had their day in the spotlight but were they all just passing fancies?
This relatively recent expression comes from American advertising posters of the 1930s. It became popular with ice cream companies who saw a flavour-of-the-month as a great marketing idea.
Often the [more…]
Although Shakespeare wrote his plays about 400 years ago, in some ways the world he wrote about has hardly dated. For instance, the plants he referred to in his plays are the same ones we’re familiar with today.
In his Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon tells Puck to squeeze the juice of a flower onto the [more…]
If you send someone to Coventry, you ignore them or ostracise them from your group. It is form of a playground bullying and also used to punish strike-breakers.
Why Coventry?
During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, Cromwell sent Royalist soldiers to be imprisoned in this cathedral city in Warwickshire, England. They were shunned by [more…]
Stows away in the shop
Let’s start with clue 169dn in the Stinker, which was a little ambiguous. ‘Stores’ suggests a few different answers including two that fitted the spaces on our grid; the noun SHOPS, places you buy things, or the verb STOWS, stashes away. We accepted both answers.
One of the world’s endangered animals [more…]
Flying through the clues
We were faced with a bit of a dilemma in the Bigcash. The usual English spelling for ‘Small handbill’ is FLYER but quite a few entries had FLIER. This is more common in American English, but as it is a variant spelling and does appear in some dictionaries, we had to [more…]
Beware Greeks bearing clues
One of my favourite tales from Ancient Greece is that of the wooden horse. Devised by Odysseus after years of unsuccessful attempts to enter Troy, Greek soldiers hid inside a large wooden horse while the rest of their army pretended to give up and sail away. The Trojans were persuaded to [more…]
Clues we might use for this word include ‘Night-time outings restriction’ or ‘After-hours travel ban’, but a curfew started as a law aimed at preventing villages burning down.
The word’s origin is in the Old French couvre-feu meaning ‘cover-fire’. In medieval times fires were precious for lighting, heating and cooking. Crude wooden houses with thatched [more…]
