Schrödinger Clue Analysis

Pinning down the ambiguities.

Yesterday, I did a data dive into change-a-letter Schrödinger clue-answer triads—wow, that phrasing’s a mouthful. You think I can get away with calling them “toggles”?

Full disclosure: I found these toggles/triads using XWordInfo’s Schrödinger page, Crossword Fiend search results, and DailyCrosswordLinks.com. Also, the version sent out yesterday had a few odd punctuations: I’ve corrected those. As ever, any suggestions of material I’ve missed are welcome.

The change-a-letter part is important. The most attention-getting parts of Schrödinger puzzles are the parts changing more than one letter—your BOB DOLE/CLINTON ELECTED, your JOHN LENNON/SEAN LENNON, your ANDREW JOHNSON/ANDREW JACKSON. These are usually the “seed entries” that inspire the whole puzzle, and as such, they’re much easier to write clues for.

The one-letter toggles are a different sort of challenge. They’re what a constructor does after the rush of the initial idea has passed and they’re doing their best to make that idea work.

Even from this limited sample set, we can notice a few motifs starting to emerge.

One answer pair appeared three times, twice with the same clue: RIDE/RILE, and its repeated clue was “Antagonize,” while the varying clue was “Get on someone’s back.”

The following answer pairs appeared twice with the same clue: GUSH/GUST (“Sudden outburst”), RIDE/RILE (“Antagonize”), TEA/TEN (“Take ___”), and the archaic MOIL/TOIL (“Work hard”).

The following answer pairs appeared twice with different clues: AIM/VIM, BASHES/BASTES, BAR/BAT (in the same puzzle, as discussed), BEAN/BRAN, FISH/FIST, HINT/TINT, HOOT/TOOT, OAR/TAR, STREAK/STREAM, and WISHFUL/WISTFUL.

Some of these are natural synonyms like WISHFUL and WISTFUL. Others become near-synonyms with a little bit of context, such as BAR and BAT if they go before “mitzvah” or HINT and TINT when talking about color.

Still others share some common themes, enough that you can coax them together without much trouble, like BEAN and BRAN or OAR and TAR (both nautical terms).

These are nice, stable, sensible toggles to build a puzzle around. If you asked me for advice on building a puzzle, I’d recommend thinking of clues and answers like these.

But as I’ve said, they aren’t the ones that excite me.

“Like acres and acres of real estate, say” is a longer clue but a solid one for EXPANSIVE and EXPENSIVE. “devilcross.com/ornamental_vase.jpg, e.g.” is a weird clue for URL and URN, but maybe the most straightforward clue possible to tie those wildly different ideas together. (If you go to that URL, you get a pic of the urn seen above.)

And “Result of two people with incompatible values exchanging numbers, perhaps” is an intriguing clue for BAD DATA and BAD DATE.

In Jim Q’s writeup of the puzzle containing that last clue, he singled it out as one of the few bumps in an otherwise pleasurable experience. Me? I loved it. It takes some cognitive work to figure out how the clue applies to both answers, but once you get there, you may feel it’s more than worth the trip.

Or maybe not. Perhaps the best description of such a toggle is “high-risk, high-reward.” If it works for you, it really works for you, and if it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.

And just as a good portfolio has the occasional risky investment, I think the smartest approach to puzzle design is to anchor it with the stabler answers, but to take the plunge now and then without fear.