Birds of a Letter
I’m usually listening to the radio when the weekly puzzle segment comes up on Sunday morning. Will Shortz, whose resume includes editing the New York Times crossword, editing Games Magazine, and spearheading the introduction of Sudoku to America, plays a simple word game with a selected listener. That listener earns the honor by being selected at random from the correct entries to a somewhat harder challenge at the end of the segment.
I have yet to be chosen. This is neither surprising nor disappointing; NPR receives hundreds of correct answers every week, perhaps thousands if it’s an easy one, and I’m hardly religious in trying to qualify. But if the answer pops into my head—it happens—or if the puzzle is interesting enough to tinker with, I send my answer in. I may have done so thirty or forty times.
I confess to a bit of disappointment this week, though. This week’s puzzle asked you to anagram the words “egret,” “crane,” and “owl” to get the names of three different birds. The answer Shortz was looking for was “eagle,” “crow,” and “tern;” starting with the obvious eagle, I worked that answer out within three or four minutes, and sent in my answer. It took me that long because I got side-tracked by trying to fit something around “wren,” whose letters also appear in the list. Happily, I was able to make that work, too: the same letters anagram to “wren,” “eaglet,” and “roc.” Eaglet is not a distinct species of bird, to be sure, and the roc is a purely fictional bird, a giant predator of Arabian mythology and popular crossword entry. But they are, nonetheless, birds, so I sent that alternative along with the more straightforward answer.
Finding an alternate, valid answer to a puzzle is considered something of a coup among puzzlers, enough to get an honorable mention. Games Magazine sends one of its prized T-shirts to anyone who corrects a significant error or discovers an alternate solution to one of its puzzles, and Shortz has credited people who have provided alternate solutions to his weekly puzzler. So, while I had no expectation of playing on the air, I had high hopes of hearing my name on the radio.
No such luck. This could be for any number of reasons. Maybe my answer didn’t make it past a less imaginative screener. Maybe Shortz himself didn’t consider the alternative interesting enough, though I doubt that. Maybe a radio editor, needing to squeeze out a few seconds, clipped the honorable mentions from the segment. Maybe there was a communications glitch. Who knows?
Oh, well. I missed out on those two seconds of fame. But I’m going to claim them here:
I’m so smart! I found an alternate answer to the weekly puzzler!
So there.