A poison pen is any maliciously written letter. I’ve always heard it in relation to an overly harsh, negative review. So, this is a terrible pun on that.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poison-pen

In the UK, terrible puns are de rigeur, but the answer has to be a recognisable standalone word or phrase. So 'poisoned pen' could be an answer, and the clue could conceivably contain a pasta-based pun on that, but 'poisoned penne' could not.

In the US, at least (TIL there's a different style across the pond, so fun), a 'pun-based' clue like that would need a question mark at the end of the clue.

Additionally, I would say that that, because the answer isn't a coherent standalone word/phrase, that particular clue/answer combo would only be found in a puzzle as part of a hidden theme shared by a number of 'special clues' throughout the crossword, with some kind of rule uniting the answers (add 'ne' to the end of a common phrase, for example).

So the puns need to be in the clue, and not the answer?

Sort of. Cryptics, which are the international style, might have a clue like "insect in pants" -> "ant", which is pants without the first and last letters.

And more complicated variants, like anagrams, mashing words together, etc.

You could have a pun in the answer - although I think that's pretty rare - but the answer itself would still need to be a recognized word/phrase.

That's really interesting—I'm not much of a crosswords fan, but I had never even considered the idea that there are "dialects" in what crosswords clues & answers could be.

From the perspective of this UK cruciverbalist that's a terrible clue. You can't just clue anything you like and call it a cryptic definition. I would argue there isn't even a proper definition component to the clue since 'poisoned penne' isn't a 'pasta dish' in any normal usage. A fair way to clue this would be to indicate the pun and use normal composite clueing (e.g. anagrams).

Well, from the perspective of a Ruby programmer, Python is terrible Ruby code. There are different rules and conventions in American crosswords; you might actually learn to enjoy them once you got past your initial "This is different! And therefore terrible!" reaction.

I don't know if this is a cultural difference with cryptic crosswords in general or if it's specific to NYT crosswords, I used to do NYT crosswords with my American partner (I'm British) and the wordplay never made sense to me. Answers often seemed to be made up of words which could literally relate to the clue but combined made no sense as a term or phrase, even as a pun.

Edit: Don't want to sound like I'm deriding their style too much, my partner always got the wordplay so clearly there was a learnable style to it

  >I used to do NYT crosswords with my American partner (I'm British) and the wordplay never made sense to me

Can't say I've ever tried an American cryptic [I regularly do the UK Guardian and Telegraph ones] but the ones quoted above don't make sense to me either:

  >Q: “It may turn into another story” A: Spiral Staircase.

Would be "...turn into another storey". In a UK cryptic there'd have to be an indication that there was a homonym involved story/storey.

  >"Pasta dish at the centre of a murder mystery...The answer was poisoned penne.

Ditto. UK version would need to indicate a homonym was involved pen/penne. And, as someone else points out, a 'Poisoned Pen' is a letter, not a murder mystery. Very strange clues indeed.

Some freely available UK cryptics:

* Guardian Quiptic: https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/quiptic/latest

* Guardian Everyman: https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/everyman

* Chambers: https://chambers.co.uk/puzzles/cryptic-crosswords/

RANDOM ASIDE: My favourite anagram, which has been involved a couple of times in UK cryptic clues is:

VINDALOO AND RICE which is an anagram of LEONARDO DA VINCI

> In a UK cryptic there'd have to be an indication that there was a homonym involved story/storey.

Well, that one can be chalked up to US/UK spelling differences—"storey" is not correct US spelling.

I'm just a casual, very infrequent crossworder, but I've noticed that many of the more punny or clever clues for NYT Crossword end in a question mark. If you see "It may turn into another story?" as a clue in a NYT crossword you know from the question mark that there's probably some wordplay or a pun involved in the answer.

Yup. There are several rules for how clues relate to answers in the NYT puzzle, and that's an import one. Here are some more [1].

Another thing casual or infrequent solvers should be aware of: day of week matters. NYT puzzles are easiest on Monday, getting progressively harder throughout the week reaching a peak on Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is midweek difficulty, but bigger.

This article [2] gives an example of how the same 4 letter word might be clued on Monday and Saturday:

Monday: “Nabisco cookie”, “Cookie with creme filling”, or “‘Twist, Lick, Dunk’ cookie”

Saturday: “Snack since 1912”, “It has 12 flowers on each side”, or “Sandwich often given a twist”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/tips-and-tricks

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/guides/crosswords/how-to-solve-a-cro...

yep, the thematic entries are nothing like cryptics; the only similarity is that they both involve wordplay. the wordplay here is closer to jokes like "what fruit wanted to conquer the world?" "alexander the grape!" - that is, while the answer will not be a real word or phrase as would be required in a cryptic, it will be logically derivable from the theme and the clue.

one interesting thing about the non-thematic entries in an american crossword is that the only form of wordplay they allow is what in cryptic parlance would be called a "cryptic definition", that is, a clue which is a straight definition in which the words need to be read laterally. the nyt cryptic definitions are as good as any i've seen in the guardian, particularly my all-time favourite,

John, to Ringo (3)

for LOO

I don't actually get how "John, to Ringo" translates to LOO, would you mind explaining?

[Edit]: Ah, totally missed the toilet connotation, thanks folks!

I suspect - John is slang for the toilet, and Ringo here would be an Englishman - so what would an Englishman call a toilet? A loo. groan

"John" is another word for bathroom. So is "loo", at least in the variety of English that Ringo speaks.

specifically, 'john' is american slang for a toilet; the corresponding british slang is 'loo'. 'ringo' is an example of a very well known englishman, so 'to ringo' is an acceptable indicator to clue 'to an englishman'.

NYT crosswords have a theme. I would imagine “poison penne” is one of the theme answers along with other pasta-based alliterations. Once you know that’s the game, then it’s not a weirdly meaningless pun but wordplay that builds as you first figure out the theme and then figure out the theme answers.

to expand on other answers, a themed NYT crossword often has four or so entries that involve some sort of punnery or wordplay, and are not actual words or phrases but can be deduced from a combination of a real word/phrase and the theme. so in this case there might have been other entries like

Pasta dish served at a burger joint: BIG MACARONI

Lose your temper at some pasta: BLOW A FUSILLI

etc.

We call them anagram puzzles, crosswords puzzles are for us other words with the same meaning.

It's not an anagram, it was portmanteau (in this case, but other wordplay is seen too).

Also, folks in the thread are ignoring Henry Hook, a famous UK constructor who used plenty of "non-standard" wordplay.

henry hook was american (and wrote american style cryptics, which are very similar to uk cryptics but have a few stylistic differences)

also i'd say portmanteau clues (and rebuses) are standard wordplay for an nyt crossword, they just unfamiliar to people who don't do that kind.

I’ve been doing the NYT crossword regularly the past year or so.

NYT crosswords often have tricks, either in the clues themselves or patterns in the puzzle. Will Shortz commented on one of his favourite clues Q: “It may turn into another story” A: Spiral Staircase.

There are others I’ve found sneaky, eg Q: Greek Leader. A: Alpha

Today’s puzzle had for example Q: Whopper Junior A: Fib

2. Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. It’s not obvious when this is the case

3. Sometimes there is an overall pattern to the puzzle. One recent example was a rebus where several squares had double O rebuses in single square. If you connected these squares together they formed the shape of a 7, ie 007. A few clues on the puzzle related to James Bond and would be meaningless without this context, eg the clue would mention a range of years and the answers were Sean Connery or Daniel Craig.

> Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. It’s not obvious when this is the case.

Another deviation from the "one letter per square, all in a line" that they sometimes have is the bent answer. I recall one for instance where there were several isolated black squares, and some answers that ran into these continued after a 90 degree turn. So you might have 5 spaces to the left of the black square, but the answer was actually 9 letters with the last 4 written upward from the black square.

As with rebuses, they don't tell you that a puzzle has this sort of thing. You are left to figure it out on your own. For that 90 degree turn example, you'd probably get it by filling in enough of the words that cross it to notice that the 5 space section matches the start of a 9 letter word that would work, and notice that the 4 letters that would complete that word are going up from the black square. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence, and then you'd go look at other places where the answers seemed to short and see that same trick works there.

I don't think I've seen any the have both rebuses and non-linear answers. That would be a nightmare.

IIRC when I was doing NYT the super tricky rebuses (the one I remember was "bell" being the rebus and you could draw a bell in the square) are only allowed to be on one day of the week. Sunday, was it?

They’re most common on Thursdays but increasingly appear on Wednesdays, too. Sunday is typically the “big” puzzle day, and has a titled theme that usually provides a hint to at least some of the clues, or the puzzle aspect.

It's likely from a NYTimes (or maybe LATimes or WaPo) crossword where all 4-10 of the longest answers followed the same punny format. But yes, it's intentionally left up to the person solving to figure out the theme, usually by filling many of the easier/shorter non-theme answers first. This style makes these prestige hand-crafted crosswords (like those in the NYT and a couple other outlets) particularly satisfying/rewarding to solve. The themes can be amazingly creative and original on a daily/weekly basis.

I haven't done a ton of crosswords in the US (because I don't really enjoy them) but I haven't experienced "pun" clues like that very often. They're usually in crosswords that think themselves special somehow. You can tell because it'll be a famous source, or the description will tell you way too much about the author of the puzzle and how awesome they are.

The majority of the crosswords just had plain clues that weren't confusing. (And didn't require "lateral thinking".)

It's a pun ... a terrible, terrible pun.

Sure, I get that "poisoned penne" is a pun on "poisoned pen", I was just wondering if there was a real meaning to the complete phrase. In a UK crossword, the answers all have to be legitimate words/phrases.

Penne is a type of pasta, so the phrase does make sense on its own. Does "poisoned spaghetti" mean anything to you?

(Not arguing, just adding some perspective.)

Penne is pronounced "pennay" in the UK in my experience, making this pun kinda dysfunctional.

Also as pointed out, UK cryptic crossword answers are phrases in actual use, not new word combinations.

Edit to add relevant example:

See 9 across ("Rotten people sin to produce malicious missive") here: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2021/03/08/independent-10733-...

I also noticed that "poisoned pen" isn't a phrase in British English, instead it's "poison pen" or more typically "poison pen letter".

Is it pronounced "pen" anywhere? That sounds very wrong to me.

Indeed... it seems that the consensus is tending towards this being so bad a pun that it isn't even a pun :)

It's a poisoned punne.

Leads right into a clue hinting at Canadian origins, a la "poisoned pen, eh?"

So in the UK 'poisoned spaghetti' would not be acceptable as a cryptic crossword answer, because it's not a _recognisable_ standalone phrase, even if it's a thing that could exist.

It doesn't make sense outside of the pun. "Poisoned spaghetti" makes as much sense as "poisoned penne", in those terms.

One UK crossword that always stuck in my mind and captures a form of word play was: Clue: Scrambled Eggs Answer: Gegs

That without working out the other clues would make that alone very hard to work out and be interesting how an AI would work that one.

Gegs is usually cited as an example of a _bad_ clue in cryptic crossword circles.

Because it’s only half a traditional clue — the cryptic part with no definition?

Yes :) It's become such a trope that I remember seeing this clue in a crossword somewhere:

Gegs (9, 4)

The answer is "Scrambled Eggs", and the clue is (I think) both a cryptic definition if you're familiar with the original, as well as a reverse anagram.

I’ve seen this sort of reverse clue signified as ‘clue for gegs’ before.

UK crosswords also have patterns though. Words like scrambled in this case often indicate you're looking for an anagram.

I think the basic idea would be OK in a UK cryptic, but you'd clue the pun explicitly.

You might have something like « Pasta dish at the centre of a murder mystery and a spiteful reviewer on the radio. »

Though you'd really want the surface reading to come out a bit smoother (and I don't think "penne" and "pen" are pronounced exactly the same).

I genuinely can't think of an example of a broadsheet cryptic crossword that would do so. Maybe other sources, though.

"Poison pen" (or poisoned pen) is the phrase the answer is punning on.

penne is a type of pasta, so yes it means a poisoned pasta of type penne.

the phrase is meaningful, but it’s not a recognised phrase like “on a roll”

UK cryptics feature answers which are words or phrases you’d find in a dictionary