The Stickler Weekly 120 Solution

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “scandal” and “crosswords” used in the same sentence before. A few days ago, an article rocked the US crossword community, claiming plagiarism of massive proportions. Before I comment on the story, I need to explain some things about US non-cryptic crosswords. First, they are a special breed with a set formula of sorts. They have very few black squares compared to the average cryptic grid and every square is cross-checked, meaning that if you solve all the across clues OR all the down clues then you’ve solved the crossword. But for this story to have any traction, this last factor – the inclusion of a theme – is paramount. For most US big-paper crosswords, a theme is a central feature – at least the longest answers MUST be devoted to the theme. It’s largely the themes that enabled the plagiarism to be exposed. In a nutshell it’s alleged that the themes were copied in their entirety, and sometimes the clues to the theme words as well. In other cases the bulk of a crossword was copied and whole crosswords were republished under different names. The person at the centre of the controversy is Timothy Parker who edits syndicated Universal Uclick crosswords. He also has dealings with USA Today. The article details the apparent reuse of themes largely from the New York Times and crosswords edited by Timothy Parker. The reuse discovery was made via a database of 1000s of puzzles going back over more than 10 years. Simply, it was possible to compare puzzles with a few database queries. So far Timothy Parker has suggested that the reuse is just coincidence and it will be hard to argue against it due to the way crosswords are built and the computerised fill that happens around theme words. It’s harder to explain identical themes AND clues, but almost impossible to prove there was any willful intent to deceive solvers. One thing’s for sure, Timothy Parker’s job just got a whole lot harder as everything published by him from now on will be heavily scrutinised.
So, what about a similar thing happening here in Oz or the UK? Non-cryptic, quick crosswords are largely rehashed words and clues just in different combinations. It would be easy to recycle these as they have nothing distinctive about them – no theme, and usually very little content that dates them. This is intentional, BTW, as many of these types of crosswords are designed to be syndicated which means they have to be as generic as possible. Cryptics are different, of course, due to the lengthy nature of clues written by a particular setter. It would be hard to claim coincidence if a clue was reused by another setter verbatim, although it wouldn’t be an impossibility. Style plays a role, making identical construction unlikely, but some answers just lend themselves to a set construction. It is common, however, to see the same (clever) idea repeated by another setter in their own words. Sometimes this is accidental, other times not.
The Australian Crossword Club (ACC) once repeated a crossword in their magazine by mistake only a couple of months apart. Very few members realised the error, most just re-solved it and submitted their entry. It goes to show that even if there was reuse, it wouldn’t stand out to the majority of solvers who probably solve many crosswords a week and don’t remember specifics about any one crossword. The late Shirl O’Brien, who set for the ACC, The Courier Mail and The Guardian, when asked about reusing a clue once told me that if she had to, she’d make sure it was an ordinary clue.