Providing an almost respectable excuse to seek out and digest arcane information is a seldom recognised benefit of solving and setting thematic crosswords. A crucial step for the setter is assessing interesting titbits as possible themes, and while with sufficient guile any subject can be worked up thematically, some topics seem to cry out for such treatment. The ogham (or ogam) theme sits in the latter category and was inspired by its entry in Brewer’s. Ogham appealed partly because it had apparently not been used before, and partly because I knew how much solvers relished transliteration devices. I soon realised that because several of the character symbols (including, notably, the vowels) could be viewed as side-by-side fusions of two other characters, ogham was readily exploitable as a cryptic theme. This could be achieved by forcing entry of two consecutive letters of an answer into one relevant cell, so that e.g. WISHBONE would become WIS(ogham-A)ONE. I rapidly abandoned that idea because ogham-I would have to be formed from Q-N, and the nearest thing to a word containing that digraph seems to be the unappealing abbreviation SQN LDR (which probably also means something rude in Welsh). I also reckoned that this method would lead too easily to a solution, and I was aiming for at least a C grade (despite earnest editorial entreaties). I therefore chose to adapt a widely-used gimmick: entries should create clashes to be resolved by substituting the ogham character representation of the conjoined clashing characters. Usually such clashes are created by intersecting across and down entries, but for reasons that will become clear, this was not appropriate here. I decided to form the clashes by overlapping the last and first letters of pairs of answers: e.g. ogham-I = Q-N could arise from an overlapping clash between IRAQ and NAMIBIA. Numbering the grid under these conditions would look odd and give too much away, so grid numbers would be dispensed with. The solver was to be appeased by presenting the clues in alphabetical order of answers, with answer length enumerations supplied as a special treat. Finally, a suitable message or word would have to be generated by resolution of the clashes.

Next, the grid. I started with the conventional assumption that symmetry should only be dispensed with if the theme could not otherwise be elegantly implemented. I also wanted to arrange the ogham characters linearly a full grid row at a time to encourage solvers to join them up along their principal axes. To maximise symmetry, that would mean an even number of rows in a Px2Q grid or an odd number of rows in a Px(2Q+1) grid. However, I feared that incorporating appropriate crossing words with clashes in a grid resolving to even two rows of ogham would be difficult without prohibitive unching, so I plumped for a single central thematic row. As 12×12 is the modal grid size, I went for a 12×13 grid as neither the amount of thematic material nor the fee on offer justified a 14×15 one.

For setting purposes I use a mixture of free software and embarrassingly poor self-written utilities in a Linux-only environment: I suspect I now have most of the functionality of TEA with much less of its celebrated user-friendliness. Another quirk is that I never write anything down on paper at any stage of the setting process, freeing me from the tyranny of abysmal handwriting.

When adding bars I wanted to provide as many longer words as possible that involved the middle row. I deliberately allowed generous checking in the central zone, and regarded it as essential that every cell of the middle row was checked. I knew at this stage that filling would need bar adjustment, but a start has to be made somewhere.

Before the fill, I needed to work out an apt dénouement for the ogham row. (At this point I will draw a veil over the considerable time wasted working with the inexplicably wrong depiction of some ogham characters in my edition of Brewer’s. Imagine my anguish at discovering that other authorities, including Unicode, agree on a different character correspondence. From then on, I used the version at ogham.lyberty.com.)

To simplify matters, I ignored ogham characters formed with slanting lines, and the five characters added later, leaving a subset alphabet of 15 characters wherein clashes are resolvable as A=H+B, O=D+L etc. Since there were fewer possibilities to consider than for phrases, I first looked at the small number of 12-letter words constructable from the subset alphabet that contained all the fully crossed characters (the vowels). One such word was DISCOUNTABLE, and most of the others were too. However, of the remainder, DECUSSATIONS rang a bell. On looking it up I immediately realised the search was over: it came to me later that a form of the word was used famously and gnomically by Sam Johnson in his definition of network, “anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the inter-sections”. A perfect gift of a dénouement, arrived at entirely by chance.

The road ahead was now clear: the vowels in DECUSSATIONS would be indicated by clashes and the consonants would stand for themselves. (Later I realised this caused a minor but annoying inconsistency: in clash-resolving ogham cells, there is a notional bar separating the original overlapping entries; in non-clash ogham cells there is no such bar. This would have been fixable by making all cells of the latter type correspond to the first or last letters of words, but at the cost of grid symmetry.) The rest of the fill was achieved semi-automatically using a variety of subterfuges to accommodate the clashes, and involved several bar relocations. Incidentally, I know that computer-generated fills are frowned upon by some setters. However, they throw up many interesting and unusual words that are not in the setter’s vocabulary, and provide useful first drafts that can be knocked into shape manually.

The next question was how to reveal the theme. I considered that not to hint at all — given the theme’s obscurity — would be grossly unfair, even by doleful Magpie standards. What kind of hint? A message generated by the usual suspects (misprints, extra words) seemed unnecessarily helpful, so I decided that hiding the word itself in the grid was sufficient. Despite trying hard with an unusually large amount of manual rejigging, I was unable to hide OGHAM within existing grid constraints without resorting to horrible words. OGAM was a lot easier, and had the advantage (from the gratuitous cruelty point of view) of being the less common form of the word. I wanted OGAM to be quite difficult to spot to make solvers solve a reasonable proportion of clues before any pennies dropped, hence the fairly tough device used for signalling the relevant letters. Eventually a diagonal OGAM was shoehorned into the grid as shown.

On returning to the grid after a long interval, I researched ogham more intensively and became dissatisfied with having orientated DECUSSATIONS as a horizontal entry when in reality carved texts were traditionally depicted vertically and read from bottom to top (see e.g. ogham.lyberty.com/oghamintro.html). I decided to rejig the grid entirely in 13×12 form, with DECUSSATIONS reading upside-down in the central column. Despite the significant chore of completing a new fill, I was happier with the result. For one thing, a 13×12 grid is aesthetically more pleasing than a 12×13 one.

I wondered about adding other thematic material — for example, ogham characters are named after trees — but couldn’t see how to do that fairly or consistently. I wrote the special OGAM-indicating clues first, making sure they functioned as required. 42d gave me a lucky opportunity to give another (possibly retrospective) hint in the form of the word rune. The last step I always take is to check that alternative entries made possible by unchecked cells are strictly excluded by wordplay.

In clueing I strive (not always successfully) to make as much sense as possible in the non-cryptic reading. Not only does this almost invariably make the clue more challenging and satisfying to solve, but it also adds to the setter’s sense of achievement. I dislike setting styles that seem wilfully to ignore the sense of the non-cryptic reading: you might as well use something like, “Put the first letter of tram into a word for ill to get a word for a piece of wood”. I mainly follow Ximenean principles, but cannot for the life of me see what is wrong with car crash = ARC and the like. Afrit’s injunction trumps Ximenes any day.

The preamble took ages, and went through many drafts. Being concise and accurate without revealing too much is difficult, and I wanted to avoid any of the dreaded preambliguity (sorry) that causes so much angst among solvers. There was also the matter of steering solvers away from the aberrant Brewer’s entry. I don’t have a test solver, so rely on forgetting my own clues after a couple of months and do my own test solving. This is surprisingly effective at weeding out useless or unsolvable clues, and helps troubleshoot the preamble.

The working title was Use a ruler. Only at the very end did I realise the aptness of Crossword on the grounds that (i) ogham is written using crossing lines, (ii) DECUSSATIONS itself can mean “crossing lines”, and is therefore a crossing or cross word. In addition, I hoped that some solvers would remember Dr Johnson’s definition of network, which is also an approximate definition of a crossword grid. Serendipity strikes again.

So off it flew to the Magpie nest. Seasons came and went; banks collapsed; policemen grew younger. Finally, a beautifully composed PDF file arrived from Shane. The preamble was slightly altered, and gratifyingly few clues had changes — negotiations commenced and an amicable consensus was soon arrived at. In my submitted version, I’d asked solvers to write DECUSSATIONS under the grid. The editors deemed this unnecessary.

I regret not having included more thematic material, and a red herring or two might have been fun. The grid would have looked better with mirror-image symmetry to emphasise the central column. A more skilled setter such as Charybdis would no doubt have been able to make all non-ogham entries in the final grid spell out real words. Which brings me to …

I have been asked to explain my pseudonym. Chorybdis was chosen because it is an anagram of my real name, and — although a neologism — was close enough to Charybdis of classical mythology to lend it a spurious authority. It also seemed to chime with the whimsical naming style adopted by many setters. Only after my first puzzle was in press several years ago (for One Across) did I discover the setter Charybdis. It was then too late to change, but I propose to stick with Chorybdis unless there are heartfelt and serious objections. In mitigation, I would point out that similar pseudonyms are not unknown among the ranks of setters: e.g. Buff and Bufo; Sam, Samuel and Samson; Duck, and Duck and Hen; Rex and Rex Kinder; Leo and Leon; Sol and Solo; Oz and Ozzie. Also, I would hope that solvers are better able than most to distinguish similar words.

Posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 6:52 pm under Setting the scene.
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