Bank Shot!
For our first article of 2021, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of a venerable form of wordplay: the letter bank. To understand how it works, try this: think of the last name of an all-time NBA great (6 letters). Now use those letters, repeated as needed, to spell the full name of another NBA all-star and two-time champ.
The images above will no doubt lead basketball fans to the answer:
In this case, Jordan is considered the letter bank — the unique letters that make up a longer word or phrase, listed with no repeats. The longer word must use each of the letters in the “bank” at least once, repeated as needed.
You may have noticed this pairing if you attempted our contest crossword puzzle in the November “Beyond Wordplay” newsletter. (The solution was revealed in the December newsletter.) In the puzzle, Jordan was used as a country, along with other countries serving as letter banks for longer entries (Niger → reining in, Oman → mano a mano, Serbia → brasseries).
In each case the country is an isogram — a word with no repeated letters. So a letter bank is the core isogram at the heart of a longer word or phrase.
Worried about election fraud? Once you see it can be pulled from a fur-lined coat, you’ll feel ultraconfident, like a funeral director eating fettucine alfredo during the Florida recount.
Being at the Beginning
Letter banks were originated by a familiar figure — New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz — who proposed them to the National Puzzlers’ League at the group’s 1980 convention as one of the “New Flats for the Eighties.” (In NPL parlance, “flats” are verse-based puzzles using a specific type of wordplay.) “WILLz” — as he is known within the NPL, for reasons you may deduce — presented letter banks in the form of a contest for the convention attendees to solve. In Dec. 1981, Philip Cohen (aka “Treesong”) introduced the letter bank as an official flat type in the NPL’s monthly magazine The Enigma, giving these examples:
- lens → senselessness
- imps → Mississippi
- spiral → appraisal, sarsaparilla
- scare up → pepper sauce
Over the years, many high-quality letter banks have been used to create NPL flats. But letter banks have also achieved a much broader appeal, becoming standard fare for logophiles.
“I do take pride in having ‘invented’ letter banks,” Will reports. “I remember the first one I made for my 1979 book, Brain Games. The letters B-L-U-M-E could be used and reused to make BUMBLEBEE. I didn’t realize it would become a classic!”
If they feel familiar, perhaps you’re a solver of the daily New York Times Spelling Bee — each has at least one word that uses all the letters in the grid, so the grid itself is a letter bank. In Bee lingo, the word using all the letters is called a “pangram” (slightly different from the typical meaning of the term for something that uses every letter of the alphabet). While we enjoy the Bee, we have even more fun coming up with whimsical ways to use all the letters. (In this case, we thought the actual pangram — unlatch — could use some spicing up.)
To get your feet wet, here are some puzzles where each bank is only 3 letters long. Word lengths are given in parentheses.
Example. Our aim (3) is to see the Abba musical, Mamma Mia (5 3).
- Some days, your mind is in a ____ (3) and you just want to ___________ (4 3).
- We sat down to ____ (3) dinner, but wound up in an intense _______ (4–1–4).
- If you go to the Pacific Northwest — don’t break the ____ (3) in ______ (5 5, 2).
- Every ____ (3), the newlyweds would turn on Seinfeld, but instead of watching — you know, _____________ (4 4 4).
Match, i.e., Thematic
Cases where the bank and longer word have some thematic tie-in are the most interesting. For instance, it can only be described as divine providence, that a schmear can be “spread around” to make cream cheese.
Here are some examples, culled from the ranks of NPL bases used through the years. Solve for the bank and the longer word or phrase:
5. Remaining ____ (5) while someone is concentrating is proper _______ (9).
6. The king let out a _____ (6) as his troops got slaughtered in a ________(8).
7. A fair minimum wage would increase the _______ (7) of those at the lower end of the ______________ (13) scale.
8. I bought championship fight tickets from a _______ (7) outside ____________ (7 6) in Las Vegas.
9. It would be ___________ (9) to play _____________________ (8 3 7) with real weapons — better to roll dice to see what happens to your character.
10. If you resist arrest, a ______ (9) might charge you with ___________ (13).
Cut My Lip → Multiplicity
Often, it’s possible to form many words or phrases from one bank of letters. Here’s a (fictional) quote from George Lucas, with a letter bank in bold. Find the other phrases made from it:
The hardest scene was the first one on Tatooine — the two Droids have just escaped the _________ (5 4) and are crossing the sands, with C-3PO trying to get a _________ (4 5) on R2-D2. We shot in the __________ (6 6) — had they kept going East, they would have wound up in _________ (3 3 3).
Spoiler Alert — answers below image.
Did you get Death Star, head start, Sahara Desert, and the Red Sea? (Bonus points for noticing “Death Star” is an anagram of “head start.”) As you can see, letter banks offer a lot of potential for wordplay fun. And we by no means exhausted the words and phrases which could be made just from this bank (headrest, shade tree, sad-hearted… the list goes on).
Continuing our fictional quote from Mr. Lucas:
11. Due to anti-U.S. sentiment, we couldn’t ________ (7) more than a few weeks in the country where we shot most of Tatooine, but the ________ (8) government ensured our safety.
12. One day, some Touaregs approached us. They had found some dinosaur bones nearby — almost a complete ___________ (11)! They offered to sell them but their asking price was __________ (10)!
13. Local Bedouins offered to act as middlemen. We were skeptical, but once our __________ (11) subsided, we shook hands and were able to __________ (2 8).
Answers at bottom.
Crowds Pity Cryptic Crosswords
Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto are two of the premiere constructors of cryptic crosswords. For many years, they created crosswords for The Nation, and recently they have started up a subscription-based weekly cryptic series called Out of Left Field. Kosman and Picciotto have long advocated for letter banks to be included as a standard clue type in cryptic crosswords, with clues indicating that letters should be spread around, expanded, or repeated. In a 2013 piece for The Nation, they cite clues for some classic examples:
- Snatch, using every element as needed in whatever way possible. (catch-as-catch-can)
- Existential question in Brontë’s letters. (To be or not to be)
Other cryptic crossword constructors have followed their lead by working letter banks into their clues. A variety cryptic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon published in The New York Times on May 8, 2016 used four letter-bank clues in a row!
Popular Items
Other thematic connections abound in the realms of people, places, and popular items, such as songs, movies, and the like.
During the 2008 financial crisis, our nation’s chief banker was none other than Ben Bernanke. (Talk about a letter BANK!)
Hip-hop artist Ja Rule neatly serves as a letter bank for smooth-jazz staple Al Jarreau, while rap impresario Master P expands to tennis great Pete Sampras.
Sometimes, two related things share a letter bank, even if the bank doesn’t itself form a word. Such is the case with former French President Francois Mitterrand and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a French organization, which share a letter bank of acdefimnorst.
Two ’90s rock bands can be made from the bank Chileans — Alice in Chains, and Nine Inch Nails. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. “Has that been there all this time?” you ask. Yes. Yes, it has.
One world capital serves as the letter bank for another. Though they may not be the first to come to mind, Banjul (Central African Republic) expands to form Ljubljana (Slovenia). The town of Antioch is the letter bank for Cincinnati, Ohio, while Gouda — the Dutch cheese — is the bank of the capital Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.
Given the letter bank, word lengths, and year of release, can you name these movies?
14. inhale → _______________ (5 4, 1976)
15. daughter → _____________ (3 8, 1967)
16. defrosting → ____________ (7 9, 2001)
Or these people?
17. comparing → _______________ (5 11, a shortstop)
18. roasting → _______________ (5 5, a drummer)
19. showering →_______________ (6 8, a composer)
In 1956, Sammy Davis Jr. had a #46 chart hit called Earthbound. While a fairly unremarkable song, it is more remarkable that earthbound serves as the letter bank to two other chart hits:
20. A #1 hit by Paul McCartney and Wings
21. A #10 hit by Vicki Sue Robinson
In some cases, a word or shorter phrase can serve as the letter bank to a longer, more memorable one, as in:
- Hospital → This too shall pass
- No sweat! → Waste not, want not
- Soaking wet → It takes two to tango
- Misanthrope → One man’s meat is another man’s poison
The phrase a wonderful sight serves as the bank for two famous sayings:
- The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
- Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
So as we leave 2020 and its challenges behind, we know that we haven’t WON YET, but if letter banks have anything to do with it, we should see expanding potential in TWENTY TWENTY-ONE.
Answers
- fog, goof off
- eat, tête-à-tête
- law; Walla Walla, WA
- day, yada yada yada
- quiet, etiquette
- scream, massacre
- income, socioeconomic
- scalper, Caesar’s Palace
- dangerous, Dungeons and Dragons
- policeman, noncompliance
- sustain, Tunisian
- Stegosaurus, outrageous
- dubiousness, do business
- Annie Hall
- The Graduate
- Finding Forrester
- Nomar Garciaparra
- Ringo Starr
- George Gershwin
- Band on the Run
- Turn the Beat Around
Credits: Several of the letter banks given above have appeared as the bases for “flats” in the pages of in The Enigma, the monthly magazine for the National Puzzlers’ League. The following are the earliest known attributions, listed by NPL members’ noms de plume and the issues of The Enigma in which the flats appeared. (Thanks to Jeffrey Harris, aka Jangler, for tracking many of these in his master list of NPL bases.)
quiet (Double-H, Mar. 1987), scream (Dart, May 1999), incomes (Xeipon + Meki, Sept. 1995), scalper (Mr. Tex, Aug. 1994), dangerous (Xeipon, Jan. 1995), policeman (Wrybosh, Sept. 1998), Ja Rule (Vebrile, Nov. 2008), Chileans (Vebrile + Spelvin, Jan. 2001), hospital (Mr. Tex, Mar. 1996), no sweat (Windjammer + Qaqaq, Apr. 1992), soaking wet (Endgame, Apr. 1997), misanthrope (Xeipon, Jan. 1996).
