#AHA MOMENT THESAURUS FULL#

Now I'm not spoiling anything by revealing that there just isn't an eight-letter word that means 'Outrageous CEO income not the end of finance.' No word exists with that meaning. Outrageous CEO income not the end of finance (8 letters) Take this clue, from the October 2013 Harper's puzzle by Richard Maltby, Jr.: The land of cryptic crosswords is a place where the clues don't make sense, at least on first reading, so you have to figure out what is being asked of you first.

These are cryptic crosswords, which are popular in England and show up in every edition of The Nation, Harper's, and occasionally in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. After that, clues like 'Country music (6 letters)' ( anthem)В should be a breeze, and you may be up to the challenge of 'Parting words (4 letters)' ( obit).ДЄll crossword puzzles provide these moments to some extent or another, but there is a type of puzzle that provides one with every single clue. Sometimes these clues will mislead you with metaphor, when they really want a hyper-literal answer, as when the answer to 'One who carries a torch (6 letters)' completely ignores the idiom 'to carry a torch (for)' when the answer turns out to be welder. If you immediately suspected that the answer to a clue like 'Party animal? (6 letters)' was likely to be pinata, then you're on the right track. Often the types of clues I'm talking about are punctuated with a question mark, to show that they aren't necessarily to be taken literally, and it's left to the solver to interpret the clue. The aha moment in a crossword setting is largely consequence-free, and that certainly doesn't happen outside the puzzle grid. When they do occur, aha moments in life have repercussions.

I cherish crosswords in general, and the aha moment in particular, because I find that such moments don't really occur too often in everyday life, when a light shines on the right choice to make and you can be confident that you are correct in your decision because everything falls into place soon after. They provide the opportunity for what one might call the 'aha moment' where you realize you have been interpreting a given clue incorrectly the entire time you've been working on the puzzle, but now you see it clearly. These are the clues that can be read in myriad ways, or don't seem to make much sense when you first read them. There is another type of crossword clue, though, one that in the short term is just as frustrating as the trivia answer you just can't remember, but is ultimately more rewarding. A lot of crossword puzzles work like this, where either you know the answer or you don't and that's really the end of the story - you've reached a dead end for that clue and have to depend on the letters from the other intersecting answers you do know.

#AHA MOMENT THESAURUS FULL#

You might know Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury and Alexander Stephens was Vice President of the Confederacy, but it's another level of trivia entirely to know these facts and that Stephens' full name was Alexander Hamilton Stephens. Some crosswords make the trivia harder by asking difficult trivia phrased in a knotty way, like 'What the 1st Secretary of the Treasury and the VP of the Confederacy had in common' ( names). The thrill gets greater the harder the trivia is, and there's no limit to what crossword puzzles may ask you, from 'TV puppet ALF's home planet' ( Melmac) to 'Hormone thought to regulate sleep/wake cycle' ( melatonin) or 'Muse of Tragedy' ( Melpomene). When you know trivia not immediately useful in your everyday life, like, say, 'Capital of Montana' ( Helena), crossword puzzles provide a literal space for that information to go, and seeing it in a grid is a small ego boost. There's something inherently satisfying about filling in a crossword puzzle answer. 'Sometimes being misled, at least for a little while, can lead you to the most rewarding destinations,' he writes. We'd like to welcome Adam Cooper, a writer and linguist, as our newest regular contributor! Here Adam explores how solving crosswords (both American-style and British-style) can offer unexpected pleasures in wordplay.

Aha moment thesaurus