“Puzzle-style checkerboard that sometimes leaves you in check”:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
You found ? The answer is “CROSSWORDS”, of course! This hobby celebrated its 110th anniversary on December 21. And since the very first grid in history (a diamond shape, three-letter words, the numbers referring to the definitions written in the grid), a long way has been covered.
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“Picking a little – yes, the verbicrucist, the person who writes grids, often begins his sentences like this – we could discuss this anniversary date”laughs Yves Cunow, who has turned more than one brain in The Obs, Le Figaro or for Larousse. “Purists consider that this is not the first crossword puzzle in history. We had to wait until May 1914 to see a first X-shaped grid, with black squares.”
While we’re at it, you can note in your diaries the imminent anniversary of the first French-style crosswords, dated 1924. Unlike sudoku, invariably used throughout the world, crosswords were quickly subdivided into national schools or linguistic. The French tradition (black squares placed asymmetrically on the grid and an overflowing love of word play and guessing for definitions) dates back to the Roaring Twenties and a pioneer, Renée David, made invisible to the general public by the another founding father, Tristan Bernard, then the writer Georges Pérec (made famous by Disappearancewritten without using the letter “e”) or Robert Scipio, stars of the post-war period.
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And as in ready-to-wear, there is nothing that wears out faster than the fashion for small white and black checks. “The reader of 2023 would not be able to fill out a Renée David grid”judge Yves Cunow, our “verbhistoricrucist” who decided to reissue the grids of heroic times, before realizing that he had to cut the work a little for his audience. “At the time, the readership was steeped in classical culture and references to scenes from The Miser or Cid are legion in the definitions. This is no longer the case today.” Same limits for grids more recent than a few decades. How far gone are the days of certain legendary definitions by Georges Pérec (“his mouth is a look” in five letters, for “SEWER”) or Robert Scipio (“tube of red” in 14 letters, for “INTERNATIONAL”).
The French grid on the grill
But behind these flashes hide other less glorious techniques, deplores Jean-Pol Vanden Branden, verbicrucist Belgian. “The great authors found magnificent definitions for great words, but to complete, like Scipio in the time of his splendor, a grid of 108 squares with five or six quarter notes, they resorted to much less refined tricks, like anagrams of small words out of order. A bit easy.”
Even the basics of the French school, the famous gallows, find themselves on the tightrope. The gallows is the custom that requires the verbicrucist to begin his grid with two words, one covering the entire first column, the other the entire first line – hence the form of gallows – without ever putting a box there. black. This was without counting on the younger generation. Like Gaëtan Goron, 37, who rages in The Obs and likes to cite the rapper Jul in his grids between two more academic references. “If I build my grid the same way, I will always get the same words, with ‘ESSENTIAL’ on the last line or the last column, because it is a nest of recurring letters. To renew myself, it I happened to start by putting ‘KALACHNIKOV’ on the right column and build my grid upside down. Or place my quarter notes arbitrarily before looking for definitions.”
With a double challenge: to seduce the reader who is trying it for the first time and the one who has been religiously filling in his grid for years. “Crosswords are one of the last vectors of loyalty for the press, with the obituary section for regional dailies or very popular columnsunderlines Gaëtan Goron. When you love an author, you end up knowing him and having fun thinking like him.” The stars of the discipline even sell collections of their best grids in their name.
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The secret lies in the balance between the masochism of difficult definitions or exotic references and the small facilities induced by knowledge of the author. “I put a lot of myself into my crosswordscontinues the verbicrucist. When I became a dad, the words ‘GIGOTEUSE’ and ‘TURBULETTE’ appeared in my grids. I also sometimes use familiarity or titillate my reader.” Who asks for more, but doesn’t always give in without protesting. “I receive around ten emails every week, there is one reader who systematically writes to me, others who complain and whose anger I defuse by responding straight away. And then, on the giant summer grid, I had 700 responses. I practically spent the month of September going through it all.”
“Level 7 is haute couture”
The giant leaps in artificial intelligence only marginally affect the work of these creators from another time. Software has been commonplace in the industry for decades. One of the most used programs was developed by the “Mister Crosswords” of New York TimesWill Shortz himself. “This is the one I use.”, agrees Julien Poirier, known in the industry under the nickname “Jujubier”. When the grid is signed, it is a crossword raised on grain with love and almost GMO-free. “It helps to fill in the end of the grid when you have to find a compound word like _ _ I _ LB _. But never for the definition”assures Jujubier.
In the world of crosswords, we didn’t wait for ChatGPT to witness the uprising of the machines. “Most of our magazines are automatically generated, but be careful what you put behind that word”, warns Olivier Delvaux, editor-in-chief of Sport Cérébral, French market leader with 87% of sales of specialized magazines. The database required “ten years of development”with particular care taken to prevent the machine from using each of the 65,000 words crammed into it more than once in each magazine. “The most challenging levels are reworked by our specialists and our force 7 crossword review [le niveau le plus ardu]it’s haute couture crafted by our authors.”
6,000 copies are sold each month, the majority by subscription, while the small boxes of the best-seller, level 3, sell 18,000 copies, especially in supermarkets. “There is no seasonality at all in the crossword market [variante où la définition, très courte, se trouve dans la case noire]where we can peak at 45,000 in the summer”, completes the big manitou of the small French and European box. If in thirty years, the average level of crossword readers has increased – “our best seller was level 1-2 twenty or thirty years ago. Now it’s level 3, a sign that the reader has gained in expertise” – that of crossword enthusiasts remains remarkably stable. “We have a few die-hards who would like us to create a level 8, but it remains marginal”smiles Olivier Delvaux.
Gray matter but not (necessarily) white hair
In addition to artificial intelligence, the craftsman-cruciverbist must deal with competition from beyond the grave: stars who have passed over to the left, some for several decades, and who have continued to be republished since then, like Michel Laclos (died in 2013) in Le Figaro. Any embryonic change leads to a volley of green wood in readers’ mail. “Already the environment is of the restricted type, if we also have to fight against the dead…”complains one of them, who puts the number of truly identified French-speaking verbicrucists at a few dozen.
Conservative, the cruciverbist? We lack data to quantify it. There is indeed a Sofres study on crossword lovers dating from 1981. And at the time, retirees appeared… at the bottom of the ranking of small box enthusiasts! But we can assume that aging baby boomers now constitute the majority of addicts. There is just a study carried out in 2009 by the association A la Croisade des mots with 500 people, in the stations of Lille, Paris and Angers. But its results are not conclusive.
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Industrialists and artisans of the profession agree on the fact that it is still a leisure activity that we embrace after a certain age, cruciverbists in short pants constituting the exception to the rule. Julien Poirier took up the gauntlet, launching the first grids in Junior Sciences and Life, suitable for young audiences with shapes of dinosaurs or monsters and themes suitable for budding scientists. Playing on the regionalist vein, he recently received the honors of the press for a giant grid in the shape of the Brittany region. Its success surprised its author, who had nevertheless printed 10,000 copies. “People ask me how to get it abroad.”
In any case, a verbicrucist who does not complicate his life is not completely a verbicrucist in his own right. “I have already made several grids with only E’s, and whose definitions did not include any”laughs Yves Cunow, worthy representative of Oulipo, the Ouvroir of potential literature, a movement that has been playing with words for six decades. “I also succeeded with the A’s on this model. But after a few grids, I was going a bit in circles. The O’s are a different story…”
The specialist in the genre remains Jean Rossat, a grid of 16,800 boxes to his credit at the town hall of Is-sur-Tille, in Burgundy. “It took me the entire winter of 1989-1990remembers the man who broke his own record on this occasion. The whole principle was to push people to solve this grid collectively. Part of my action consists of decompartmentalizing this solitary activity, which people share around the love of language.” An idea for your next coffee break with your colleagues?