Alphabetical by Michael Rosen Page A

‘z’ in the loan word ‘czar’. It can combine with vowel ‘y’ in ‘Cyprus’, ‘cynic’ and ‘Cyril’.
    You can find it embedded in the three-letter consonant sound ‘-tch’ as in ‘itch’ but that sound is of course much more usually written as ‘ch’ as in ‘church’. Putting a consonant sound in front of the ‘c’ also gives us the very different ‘arc’, ‘alchemy’ and ‘anchor’.
    For sound-play with the ‘hard c’ see ‘ The Story of K ’, and for ‘soft c’ see ‘ The Story of S ’.
    â€˜Ch’ word-play gives us ‘choo-choo train’, ‘choochy face’, ‘hoochie-coochie man’, ‘cheep-cheep’, ‘cheeky-cheeky’, ‘chop-chop’, ‘the Chattanooga Choo-choo’ and ‘cheap and cheerful’.

C IS FOR CIPHERS
    A N ISSUE OF the Daily Telegraph during the Second World War included the usual crossword but on one particular occasion was accompanied by a challenge, in which readers were invited to solve the puzzle in under twelve minutes. If they thought they could, they were asked to make contact with the newspaper. Some twenty-five readers were invited to Fleet Street to sit a new crossword test. Five of them completed the crossword in twelve minutes while one other had only one word missing when the time was up. A few weeks later, these six people were interviewed by the intelligence services and recruited as codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where a team of people were deciphering the messages transmitted by the German military through Enigma machines. Some of the clues are straightforward: ‘16 across: Pretend (5)’, for which the answer is ‘feign’.
    Others are what are known as ‘cryptic’:
    13 across: Much that could be got from a timber merchant (two words – 5, 4), for which the answer is ‘Great deal’.
    14 down: The right sort of woman to start a dame school (3), for which the answer is ‘Ada’.
    18 ‘The War’ (anag.) (6), for which the answer is ‘Wreath’.
    The most cryptic is: ‘22 across: The little fellow has some beer: it makes me lose colour, I say (6)’, with ‘impale’ being the answer, though the last thing I ‘impaled’ was a barbecue sausage.
    If you tot up the techniques needed to solve these they include: memory of synonyms and definitions; awareness of idioms, homonyms and puns; an ability to see letters on the page divorced from their meaning, usual punctuation and spacing; and the ability to jumble and reassemble letters. At the time it was felt that these capabilities would be useful when faced with the encrypted messages that the centre at Bletchley picked up – pages that looked like this:
    FDJKM LDAHH YEOEF PTWYB LENDP
    MKOXL DFAMU DWIJD XRJZY DFRIO
    MFTEV KTGUY DDZED TPOQX FDRIU
    CCBFM MQWYE FIPUL WSXHG YHJZE
    . . . and so on across several pages.
    I’m not particularly good at crosswords though I did win the Boy’s Own Paper crossword competition in 1958. I’m pretty sure I was imitating my parents who spent every Sunday afternoon in a huddle over the Sunday Observer ’s ‘Everyman’ crossword, an activity that seemed even then to be full of dubious motives: repetitive, compulsive behaviour; enjoyable masochism; rigid, rule-bound process; succumbing to the will of an anonymous tyrant . . . To watch them was an initiation into the inner recesses of the alphabet. The anagram procedure they followed was to write the letters in a ring; words for which they had some letterswere written out on the white margins of the Observer with the blanks written as dashes; they talked of possible and impossible letter combinations and then roared with laughter when they overlooked the ‘cn’ in the middle of ‘picnic’.
    Cryptic crosswords today have become yet more cryptic, using