This morning, an article was published on the New Yorker’s website with the title and subtitle: “Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive? The puzzles spread from the United States across the globe, but the American crossword today doesn’t always reflect the linguistic changes that immigration brings.” In short, even crosswords are complicit in Western sins.
The author of the article, Natan Last, weaves together the story of Mangesh Ghogre, a 43-year-old crossword constructor from Mumbai, with the history of crossword puzzles and their lexicon, all the while sketching a patina on the U.S. immigration system. Ghogre, whose success in crafting crosswords enabled him to immigrate to the U.S. from Mumbai, serves as the article’s protagonist.
If the author took a different tone, the facts of the article could have been fashioned into an American dream come true — a young man from Mumbai, with a deep knowledge and love of crossword puzzles, levers his unique talent to acquire an EB-1A permanent-residency visa (the rare kind granted only to high-achieving individuals) so that he can move to the U.S. and pursue his dream of owning a puzzle company.
Ghogre, known for carrying around English dictionaries and crossword puzzles as a boy in India, tirelessly submitted his work to outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times at the beginning of his crossword-making career. An admission by the former propelled him forward in American crossword communities, and ultimately, through the American immigration system.
And yet, Last cannot help but turn the piece into an “America is ignorant” elegy. He criticizes crossword creators in the U.S. for inflecting clues or answers “with negative, sometimes racist, connotations,” and relying too often on “the othering manacles of italicized, ‘foreign’ words.”
With sophisticated turns of phrase, Last righteously challenges the American English monoculture of . . . American English crossword puzzles. (I will remind my reader that the article in question was published in the New Yorker — a magazine that unabashedly publishes its work in American English.) According to Last, crossword puzzles rely too heavily on a Westernized pool of common knowledge, and thus are cruelly insensitive to the influences of other cultures — particularly those brought to the U.S. by immigrants in the last few decades.
In the article, Last casts Ghogre as the clear-eyed, global observer of the insensitive, cultural narrowing of American crosswords.
Ghogre mentions that American puzzles offer a narrow aperture through which to view Indian culture, citing the “usual suspects” of naan, raja, rani, sari, delhi, sitar, ravi, nehru, and so on. It felt flattening, doubly so when clues had inaccuracies, as if the words were tchotchkes bought by the cosmopolitan solver and deposited on the mantelpiece of the grid.
Last’s piece, while certainly clever in concept and rich in language, contradicts its own thesis. It is exactly because American English has adopted foreign words like “naan” and “sari” that they are potential contenders for an American English crossword in the first place. Last glosses over the necessity of common parlance to connect the creator and solver of a crossword puzzle — while a clue that pointed a puzzler to, say, an Assamese word would be more “diverse” than a word in American English, it would be useless or even cruel if the puzzler had no knowledge of the Assamese language.
Crosswords are notorious for providing obscure clues — this is the challenge of the puzzle. But just how obscure the clues are is itself the art of constructing a crossword. Throughout the piece, Last bemoans that American crosswords generally utilize words, whether of English or foreign origin, that are recognizable to most speakers of American English.
Last also insinuates that contemporary American crossword creators whitewash other cultures in their construction of crossword clues. He points to a 2015 study conducted by Charles Kurzman and Josh Katz of 2,092,375 New York Times clue-and-answer pairs, that illustrates how “words like nada lose their Spanishness over time.”
Kurzman and Katz conclude, puzzle parochialism is actually deepening: “the [Times] puzzle today uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.” Globalization, waves of immigration, and hiring efforts encouraging diversity may have remapped the newspaper’s reporting desks, but “when we turn from the New York Times news pages to the puzzle page, the rest of the world fades away.”
The study seems to miss an obvious tautology: Words gain common usage in American English when commonly used by speakers of American English. The trouble for Last is that American English is a radically inclusive language. While Last rejects the image of America as a melting pot, its language certainly is. Like the examples of “nada” or “sari,” words that were once foreign have become familiar, and so no longer qualify as “non-English.”
As is almost always the case, foreign words are organically adapted into American English from the bottom up, not the top down. Foreign words do not become incorporated into American English when an editor at the New York Times decides that they can be published within its prose, or its crossword, for that matter.
The piece unconsciously tugs at a critical question in the current discourse on the place of multiculturalism in American identity: Do influential American institutions have a moral responsibility to cater to citizens of the U.S. or citizens of the world?
Throughout the article, Last assumes that American publications have a duty to prioritize multiculturalism over Americanism, even in puzzles. The quest for perfect diversity is, of course, impossible to achieve — there will, in every case, be yet another group to include. Only an infinitely long and complex puzzle could satisfy the yearning for totalizing diversity. I wish the New Yorker good luck in solving it.