I have been taking several current events newsletters for the past year – The Brew, Punchbowl News and the NYT The Morning. I take other email news feeds as well, but they tend to focus on finance or medicine. Some of these offer puzzles/games for their readers – The Brew and NYT The Morning both do. Sometimes, other newsletters do too.
The past few months, I have been working on the NYT The Morning’s “pangram” game. The game is simple. You are given seven letters arranged as beehive cells – six hexagons arranged around a central hexagon. The game is to make a word from the letters; any letter can be used more than once. I was not particularly successful at the pangrams when I first tried to solve them. I gave up in disappointment only to discover the following day that the answer(s) were common words. I resolved to be more persistent.
After a couple of weeks, I decided that I needed a disciplined approach to these challenges. It wasn’t enough to stare at the seven letters and wait for that thunderclap “Aha!” phenomenon. No, I would approach these brainteasers algorithmically. I’d look for common letter combinations. These would be endings like -ing, -ed, and -able. I’d also look for consonant pairs that begin words – things like br-, ch-, th-, and so on. My success rate improved from 0/5 per week to 3-4/5 per week. I was still stifled by compound words, but I have since added another strategy that allows me to get those as well. Now, I am up to 6-7/7 per week.
And this brings me to HICKELED. Most days, after awakening, I read my email, and work on the puzzles. I consider these as synaptic lubricants – activities to help keep my waning cognitive abilities from eroding any faster than absolutely necessary. Today’s pangram had all of these letters. I arranged them various ways in my head, and I finally said HICKELED! Susan looked at me puzzled. “Is that even a word?” she asked. “Probably not,” I answered, “but it has the virtue of using all of the letters. Besides, it is the past tense of the verb, to hickle. It addresses the transitive verb to hickle (gerund form hickling). We both chuckled at the silliness of my proposition.
Later, in the afternoon, after trying consonant pairs like ch-, cl-, and others, it dawned on me to consider compound words. I thought child- was a nice stem. A moment later, it dawned on me.
HICKLED indeed!