As regular readers will know, I am an inveterate fan of cryptic crosswords. At the everyday level, they are the perfect way to kill 20-50 minutes of otherwise boring time. There is a refined elegance to clue-setting: the best are little works of art. Crossword-solving also cultivates the useful talent of looking beneath the clue’s explicit surface meaning to the meaning lurking beneath – which trains solvers in the essential creative act of seeing the same thing from different perspectives.
Cryptic crosswords instil the very important idea that problem-solving is rarely linear
But there is perhaps something even more valuable about the habit. There are many ways of solving any given clue, hence much of the skill lies in switching between various angles of attack. This makes crossword-solving a valuable training in the same kind of mental dexterity that you use in mathematical puzzles, good detective fiction or indeed real-life detective work of any sort.
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