Point Of View

When it was first announced that a prize would be awarded to whoever was able to make the most words from "tricentquinquagenary," I immediately set myself to the task, and proudly announced one night as we were proofreading that I had come up with about 270 words thus far.

Whereupon one of the typesetters said her computer had spit out 390.

The gauntlet had been thrown down - I couldn't let a computer beat me. On the morrow, and with the valuable advice of Sheridan Sansegundo that I should take it one letter at a time, I readdressed the tongue-twister, and got to 400-something.

Then Sheridan, at the end of the day, announced that the contest's first entrant had just weighed in "with 613."

"I can't stand it," I said. "I'm taking it home with me this weekend, and I won't come back to work until I've got more than 613."

By that time I was multiplying every word I could with suffixes and prefixes, as in "queuer," "queueing," and "reinquire," "retint," "retinter," "reurinate" "reurinating," and summoning up all the crossword words I could, such as "etui," "erg," "ecru," "riata," "raree," "quay," "ute," "anent," "yurt," and "irenic" (this last had special meaning for me, inasmuch I suspected the contest had been a fiendish idea of Irene Silverman's).

Irenic means peaceful, as I recall, and by that time I was anything but; my competitive juices were roiling.

That weekend I went to bed long after everyone else, as is not my wont, wondering if "gace" weren't a fish, and how to squeeze out some more words beginning with "Y" - yen, yin, yarn, yang, yenta, yea, yet, yaqui - and exulting over "tata" and "tutu." And, at 4 a.m., on coming to the surface from a deep-dream dive, more words would appear . . . gyre, gentian, gantry, carnate, cattery, runic, nougat, enate, nut, nutty . . . I would remember to write them down first thing on arising. Indeed, as I told Mary, I was obsessed.

But also triumphant. I went to work that Monday with a sheaf of 26 pages of words, totaling, as best I could figure, 661, or thereabouts. Sheridan said she had given up at 600. The man with 613 was beaten, even assuming I had some duplicates and some non-words.

That's when Sheridan opened a thick manila envelope addressed to the Star that had arrived that morning and pulled out a neatly printed and flawlessly alphabetized entry of 1,443 words!

So the grand prize would not be mine after all. With sympathy, Sheridan handed me the "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Crossword Words," but I put it down unopened at the foot of my desk. I would look through it sometime, but for the moment I wasn't interested. The Ruthian total was so beyond my ken that it had served, mercifully, to break the spell. I would go on to other challenges in time, and I would in the meanwhile be comforted by the fact that I had given it my best shot, that I had at least dared to be great.

Jack Graves