Theft of literary, academic, or cruciverbal work

March 4, 2016 6:57 PM

The structure of a crossword puzzle can be broken down into several characteristic elements, the most distinctive of which are its theme and its grid. With numerous independent puzzles published daily in various periodicals and in syndication one might expect these elements to be repeated occasionally through circumstance, but a recent analysis of tens of thousands of individual puzzles found far more replication than chance would explain in the puzzles produced by Timothy Parker for USA Today and Universal Uclick.
posted by Songdog (38 comments total)

At this point I'm waiting for someone to use the Pierre Menard defense against plagiarism.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:14 PM on March 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thank you for this. It's been a long week, and settling down on the couch with a hot cup of tea, a blanket, and a crossword scandal feels like the perfect way to unwind.
posted by redsparkler at 7:14 PM on March 4, 2016 [23 favorites]

Having constructed a few in my life, I can only say that there are certain words that recur because they work vis-a-vis their balance of vowels to consonants. If aliens or archaeologists in the distant future are trying to glean a knowledge of our culture through crossword clues -- an unlikely scenario, I grant -- it is sure that Herman Melville will be known not as the author of Moby-Dick or Billy Budd rather as the writer of Oomo.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:18 PM on March 4, 2016 [22 favorites]

Oboe, Oreo, and Oleo are taken?
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:36 PM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Holy cow, I thought this was going to be like the example ricochet biscuit gave, but this is a shadier than the shadow cast by Italian volcano, 6 letters (MT ETNA)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:38 PM on March 4, 2016 [7 favorites]

I wonder if the Universal/uclick guy will change his DGAF attitude if the NYT/Shortz actually sues.
posted by sleeping bear at 7:42 PM on March 4, 2016

And now I'm curious if DGAF has ever been a crossword answer:

Could not care less, 4 letters
posted by sleeping bear at 7:44 PM on March 4, 2016 [8 favorites]

Sometimes I like to stop and reflect that while all the other primates are hanging out in the forest periodically flinging poop at one another, humans 1) created crossword puzzles and 2) attached prestige to people who are clever at making them, to the point where it makes sense to 3) plagiarize other people's crosswords, which is such a scandal that we 4) read long articles detailing every aspect of the scandal.

Culture is a very strange construct.

Also wow that is just outright puzzle theft. Just pay Will Shortz, man!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:08 PM on March 4, 2016 [20 favorites]

We're through the looking glass here people
posted by destro at 8:12 PM on March 4, 2016

I'm sorry, there are crossword puzzles that Will Shortz does not edit?
posted by drfu at 9:01 PM on March 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

Astounding coincidence, 8 letters (BU_LSH_T)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:09 PM on March 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

Mot Aper, Thy Irk! (7, 6)
posted by sylvanshine at 9:10 PM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

a hot cup of tea, a blanket, and a crossword scandal (10 letters) [METAFILTER]
posted by hippybear at 9:16 PM on March 4, 2016 [22 favorites]

5 letter word down for Timothy Parker FR__D?
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:41 PM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sounds like somebody is going to do their next crossword in pen.
posted by hal9k at 10:04 PM on March 4, 2016 [8 favorites]

String computation is one of my technical specialities.
This bullet point stood out to me-

*The fill: The rest of the answers in the puzzle. Computers nowadays can aid in finding suitable fill.

I postulate that is the reason why so many answers are reused.
posted by MisplaceDisgrace at 12:34 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've got a friend from college days who is quite the crossword puzzle maker (he was in the movie Wordplay). I've sent him the story, and if he says anything of interest, I'll report back.
posted by bryon at 12:53 AM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm sorry, there are crossword puzzles that Will Shortz does not edit?

Not that I know of.
posted by bongo_x at 1:17 AM on March 5, 2016

Byron, Wordplay is one of my favorite movies! I understand if you don't want to share your friend's identity. But no matter who he is, I already love him.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 4:22 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's been fascinating watching this unfold on Crossword Twitter this week. The evidence seems indisputable, and for someone as prominent as Shortz to offer a totally non-hedged judgement of plagiarism is awfully telling.

If I had to guess I would agree with Rex Parker's assessment that this is the apotheosis of auto-fill, which has been an ongoing issue ever since the computer tools came up to speed and you can basically auto-populate a whole grid (of you follow his blog you will find countless examples of suspected auto-fill in the NY Times, for example. One of the hallmarks of the Will Shortz Era has been that the difficulty moved from the vocabulary to the cluing, but it has been accompanied by a tendency toward junky, random fill notable for its handy vowel-to-consonant ratio (see OBOE, OMOO,ESME, etc). Auto-fill makes this problem a million times worse, and one of the reasons I'm currently in love with the AV club puzzles (edited by Ben Tausig, quoted in the article and the first person to go public as a plagiarism victim) is the obvious care that goes into the whole thing, fill and theme alike.

The process for the plagiarized puzzles seems to be: take existing theme puzzle, reuse theme answers, add a few black square to the grid, auto-fill, write clues. I would love to know how many people on that alleged staff of 60 are pseudonyms. At the moment I'm leaning toward "over 90%"
posted by range at 5:57 AM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

"Crossword Twitter"

What a time to be -----!
posted by srboisvert at 6:00 AM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm actually amazed that no cruciverbalist caught this before now. These are people with amazing language and memory skills. When I read this article I fully expected the search for duplicate trends to have started with someone like Rex Pieper having 'noticed' a few repeats from 1982.
posted by Dashy at 6:03 AM on March 5, 2016

I have no horse in this race, but I think the mere fact of repeats is not in itself proof of plagiarism. A friend of mine put himself through university by constructing and selling crossword to Dell and while he has not done so for 25 years, he says he still occasionally finds a puzzle he created in 1989 or something in their newly-released books.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:10 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

> he says he still occasionally finds a puzzle he created in 1989 or something in their newly-released books.

Under somebody else's name?
posted by languagehat at 7:31 AM on March 5, 2016

This seems to have been so rampant that as soon as people started digging, they just kept finding stuff. Tausig just posted a similarly-shady exchange from 10 years ago that he apparently found this morning.
posted by range at 7:42 AM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

In my 82-minute conversation with Parker, he acknowledged that he often used pseudonymous bylines in both USA Today and Universal crosswords — “Henry Quarters,” for example, “is one of the aliases,” he said. Asked which author names were pseudonyms and which were real, Parker said: “I don’t know. I don’t have a percentage on that.”

. . . how do you NOT KNOW? Don't you pay these people? There must be records somewhere that you can look up. If not, that's incredibly shady and crappy for the authors.
posted by chainsofreedom at 8:03 AM on March 5, 2016

I should think most crossword puzzles not by well known people or not in major media are created as work for hire and that their authors do not therefore retain copyrights.
posted by spitbull at 8:18 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Joon Pahk, a friend of mine who's a bit of big deal in national crossword contests, posted on my Facebook feed about how this has been an open secret in the crossword community for a while, but that the actual spadework in documenting the case hadn't been done until now.
posted by jonp72 at 8:20 AM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Does this explain the multiple occurrences of "Common Cause Founder" = Nader in so many puzzles? Examples: 61A, 25D
I guess Gardner just doesn't fit as well.
posted by MtDewd at 10:46 AM on March 5, 2016

Does this mean we might stop seeing OREO clued so much? Our group is staring to wonder if Nabisco might be paying puzzle constructors.
posted by JHarris at 4:11 PM on March 5, 2016

My puzzle-making friend said he had heard this was going on, but he declined to offer further insight or speculation. I suspect he wants to see how some of this plays out first.
posted by bryon at 9:20 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Am I the only person here who doesn't have a friend who's a big deal in the crossword cabal?
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:49 PM on March 5, 2016 [12 favorites]

People may be just riffing on the subject of junky fill, but the article blows my mind with copying the themes, like the puzzle with “DRIVEUPTHEWALL,” “GETONONESNERVES”, and “RUBTHEWRONGWAY”. It amazes me that somebody would expect not to get caught, and it amazes me they didn't for so long -- long enough to do it for 65 puzzles over nearly twenty years And consistently appearing in the NYT first, so they're not coincidental reinventions.

(I like to talk about fill and the effect of the computer, too.)
posted by away for regrooving at 2:26 AM on March 6, 2016

range or other people who have been following commentary, I'd love pointers to additional comments by puzzle makers. I'm looking at #gridgate now.
posted by brainwane at 3:49 PM on March 6, 2016

Under somebody else's name?

Under no name at all.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:02 AM on March 7, 2016

So how is that relevant to the topic of plagiarism?
posted by languagehat at 12:39 PM on March 7, 2016

From FiveThirtyEight:

The longtime editor of two major crossword puzzle series is temporarily stepping away from his editorial role, the puzzles’ publishers announced Monday, three days after FiveThirtyEight published an investigation into accusations of plagiarism against him.

posted by jjwiseman at 4:18 PM on March 7, 2016

The gist of it is that if I see a puzzle that is notably similar to one Paul did thirty years ago, it is quite possible it is one Paul did thirty years ago, being reused by the current owners.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:23 PM on March 8, 2016