One Year In
Looking back on the first year of Beyond Wordplay, exploring the art, science, and culture of words.
We launched Beyond Wordplay with a mission to be a hub for word-lovers. We felt — and still feel — that “serious wordplay” is having a transformative moment — a floruit, if you will — with new life infused into old wordplay forms, technology enabling ever-more audacious puzzle constructions, and vibrant on- and offline communities, with a focus on inclusion.
We also felt we could offer some historical perspective, bringing a context for the works of such pioneers as Dmitri Borgmann, Martin Gardner, and A. Ross Eckler — not to mention classic Will Shortz-era GAMES Magazine puzzles and contests — to those a bit newer to the game.
Our approach is inspired by Borgmann’s books from the mid-’60s, Language on Vacation and Beyond Language — in which he transcended the boundaries of the dictionary to explore the realm of the possible, including “popular items” in the language landscape like people, places, movies, songs, brands, etc. Wordplay with a dose of pub quiz, as it were.
We set out to shine a spotlight on creators, creations, communities, and events, and provide some new and hopefully engaging wordplay content along the way. And we’ve been gratified at the results — most of all, the relatedness we’ve been able to experience with “wordplay nation.”
Launch
It’s a Real Tweet to Meet You
After launching the site with our first post a year ago, we quickly branched out into social media on Facebook and Twitter, where we met many of you. On our Twitter feed, we mused on the linguistic stylings of Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life, enjoyed the mishearings of mondegreens, and live-tweeted the entire Super Bowl in AEIOU form (yes: Superbowlcalics!) with the help of author and noted Scrabble dad Stefan Fatsis.
Virus outbreak has Dem. in panic! (8)
In no uncertain terms, May 2020 was a crazy time to launch. The CORONAVIRUS / CARNIVOROUS anagram was a clever diversion for a minute, then gave way to the realization that we’d all be living this new reality for some time. Ben Zimmer covered ways the community was getting through these puzzling times, and later reported on “COVID coinages.” Guest contributor and lyricist Amanda Yesnowitz offered some Hamiltonian insights (what Hamilton lover isn’t also a wordplay lover?), while Allegra Kuney covered the online beat, like the endearing #Don’tLeaveMe challenge, emoji acrostics, and the red hot “redaction action” on Twitter. With Allegra’s invaluable help, we added a newsletter, blending all that nougat-y wordplay goodness into one delicious treat.
For my part, I aimed to deliver some new musings on classic wordplay forms, familiar to the Krewe of the National Puzzlers League, but perhaps not as much the broader puzzling community. In Beyond Wordplay content over the past year, one can find treatments of:
Sesquipedalian songs
Supervocalics (in this case “known human beings”)
Charades
Quadriliterals (writing constrained to 4-letter words)
Letter Banks
Consonantcies
Pangrams (one Starbucks drink in particular), and
Transdeletions
…to name a few.
Meanwhile, Ben Zimmer covered a mini-boom in palindromes at the box office, and Mark Saltveit announced the latest SymmyS honorees for palindromic excellence.
And we’ve kept our powder dry with plenty of material in store on anagrams, isograms, Scrabble board puzzles, and a trove of other logological explorations yet to come.
Art
We have been impressed and inspired by so much creative work that has breathed new life into old wordplay forms.
Top of mind in this area is Anthony Etherin, whose “constrained verse” creations surprise and delight daily on his Twitter feed, and can be found in his Stray Arts and Slate Petals collections from Penteract Press. His palindromic poetry has already surpassed what you may have previously thought possible, and his new ‘releases’ continue to raise his own bar.
To wit, one of our favorites:
FACEMASK (Palindrome)
Put it on.
Knot it up.
Walks a man,
in a mask….
Law:
Put it on.
Knot it up.
Anthony joins others like Christian Bok, and Pedro Poitevin in their elevated artistic approach, reaffirming our conviction we are in a belle epoque for wordplay.
Another clear artistic standout — and one of our most gratifying interactions of the past year — resulted from our look at the history of Scrabblegrams (using all 100 Scrabble tiles in some creative way). We anointed Georgia’s own David Cohen as the top creator of the form. He then reemerged to supply an astonishing array of new Scrabblegrams, any one of which would have been the best of its kind in years prior. In so doing, he too set an artistic bar we challenged ourselves to meet. Between us we concocted pithy movie reviews, commemorated the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, observed Yom Kippur and Election Day, and recast Genesis 1:1 in 100 tiles, not to mention offering the world’s first formula/Limerick/Scrabblegram.
We considered David’s Zen offering possibly the most sublime:
A Quiet, Conscious, Empty Mind
The average fool arrives here blind
An ego waking up to find
A quiet, conscious, empty mind
Now today I realize
Relax
Just be
(The 100 tiles do not include the title, and the blanks are N and E).
David’s correspondence with us included the following email:
I agree. Just to follow up, next is a COVID pandemic quarantine Scrabblegram (I realized I owed you one). Thanks for everything!
With this, he had achieved his ultimate — a seamless Scrabblegram which slipped through undetected, even to an audience trained to spot them.
Later on, it took all of our energy to muster a reply in kind:
Dave — thx for kudos on seeing ‘Word Wars’. I just read your note — quite a “GOAT” accomplishment…i.e. finalizing a believable reply.
Exhausted, we concluded our 100-tile back-and-forth.
Science
As technology evolves, it enables as it invalidates. It makes trivial certain challenges of the past, and is a tool for the creative future, pushing crossword grids and other puzzles to new levels. Computers remain great search tools. But the determination of what results may be elegant, relevant, or worthy of note remain the aesthetic purview of humans.
For Wired, Ben Zimmer documented the ascendancy of “Dr. Fill,” a puzzle-solving AI which “won” this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Championship, successfully integrating a neural net approach to its previously brute force search capabilities.
A mathematical perspective also inspired Malaika Handa’s 7xwords project — a crowdsourced construction megacollab — after she noticed the number of valid 7x7 crossword grids allowed exactly one a day for a year, with a break on Mondays. She shared her thoughts with Allegra Kuney and Beyond Wordplay readers.
We have embarked on our own internal effort to combine semantic and logological querying and problem solving. Our internal engine AskDmitri has begun to source results we publish.
The “science” arena is one where we see untapped potential to bridge to interesting results in natural language processing, AI, historical linguistics and other areas of more “formal” areas of study with a wordplay component.
Culture
Over the past year, we have enjoyed connecting to the culture and community of wordplay and puzzling. We are encouraged by a blossoming of puzzle blogs, podcasts, and tournaments. There are Twitter feeds dedicated to anagrams (Dream Horse = Mr. Ed’s a hero) and “Lowdown” Letter Banks, and a Facebook page just for Supervocalics (go figure that!)
Constructing tools have allowed many to enter the game. A focus on inclusion has manifested itself in major publications affirmatively hiring and setting inclusion criteria for previously underrepresented constructors. An awareness of cultural bias informs the discussion around what constitutes “common knowledge.” This past year saw a number of puzzle efforts to raise funds for good causes. These are encouraging trends.
Alongside the continued high quality of established puzzle offerings (such as Aries Puzzles, Fireball Crosswords, and Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest), we are specifically encouraged by a younger crop of constructors whose direct-to-solver puzzle sites are unconstrained by stuffy fill and cluing conventions, while remaining true to core standards, and continue to impress in unforeseen ways. Quiara Vazquez’ qvxwordz, Paolo Pasco’s Grids These Days, and Adam Aaronson’s puzzles are among the standouts. As Paolo’s Twitter profile says: “What if crosswords but modern?” We senescent Gen Xer’s approve.
Speaking of evolution, the 50+ year-old journal Word Ways is entering into a new phase, possibly evolving into a successor publication. While that is worked out, the journal Interim is being published by Darryl Francis and Jim Puder, in its stead. It provides a healthy serving for the more hardcore fans of “recreational linguistics” and we hope to partner with it more deeply in the months ahead. Those interested in subscribing can email wordways2@outlook.com.
In the past year, we’ve been able to cover word-related goings-on too numerous to mention: podcasts (Fill Me In, Merriam Webster’s Word Matters), streams and meet-ups (That Word Chat, Cursewords), tournaments (ACPT, Boswords), puzzle-based entertainment (Zach Sherwin’s Crossword Show, David Kwong’s Inside the Box), actual buildings allowing real people in! (Planet Word), and other events (American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year, Scripps National Spelling Bee, etc). All signs of a thriving community.
Most gratifying for us has been the opportunity to take our merry band of Beyonders and create puzzling events for That Word Chat, and a Supervocalic game room at ACPT. We look forward to more such interactions with the community.
Finally, co-founders Chris Cole, Ben Zimmer, and I appreciate the efforts of our team of contributors: Adam Aaronson, Ben Bass, Alex Boisvert, Katja Brinck, Alan Frank, Jeremy Horwitz, Dean Inada, Allegra Kuney, Robyn Weintraub, and others who have offered their unique skills behind and in front of the curtain, on technology projects, creating and editing puzzle content, and representing BW at online events.
Gratitude
At its core, Beyond Wordplay is an outlet for those of us on the team to connect and share things we probably would have been doing anyway (shh… don’t tell anyone). We greatly appreciate the community’s responses to our efforts, and intend to look for ways to broaden the mission in the coming year.
