At Lovatts we pride ourselves on producing crossword and puzzle magazines of the highest quality and we try our best to avoid errors. While we do always check our puzzles, the occasional mischievous gremlin sneaks in and upsets a clue.
A gremlin is a mythical creature, a cheeky invisible sprite responsible for causing unexplained disorder and confusion. According to most dictionaries, gremlins originated in the 1920s among RAF aviators and were blamed for the engine faults in aeroplanes. The word possibly derives from the Old English greme ‘to vex’.
It could also come from a blend of Irish gruaimin ‘ill-humoured little fellow’ and goblin.
The earliest recorded use of the word gremlin in print is in a poem published in a 1929 journal called Aeroplane, however aviation and history writer Dave Stern says that gremlins first appeared in 1923. Stern says that a British navy pilot who was rescued after crashing into the sea blamed little people for causing the crash. He explained that they jumped out of a Fremlin beer bottle and started messing with the flight controls. During World War II gremlins were blamed for many inexplicable aircraft accidents, on both sides of the conflict.
Aviator Pauline Gower described Scotland as ‘gremlin country’ in her 1938 book The ATA: Women with Wings. She wrote ‘Scotland is a mystical and rugged territory where scissor-wielding gremlins cut the wires of biplanes when unsuspecting pilots were about’.
Author Roald Dahl, an ex-RAF pilot, called his first children’s novel The Gremlins. It was published in 1942 by Disney, but a revised version was published by Random House in 1943. In the story, the gremlins sabotage British aircraft in revenge of the destruction of their forest home.
He named female gremlins fifinellas, after the racehorse that won the Epsom Derby and the Epsom Oaks in 1916, the year Dahl was born. Baby gremlins were called widgets.
Since then, gremlins have featured in many stories, films and cartoons and have ventured outside of aircrafts and into other things, including on the rare occasion, our crossword books!
As you know, the best way to recognise evidence of gremlin activity is if there is an error in a puzzle that makes it frustrating, difficult or impossible to complete.Luckily, with our terrific team of compilers and checkers, gremlins are few and far between. Should you spot one, the best way to report it is via our website, by email or by letter.
Happy Puzzling!
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