Crosswords
Posted: Tue 13 March, 2007 Filed under: Cynicism, Travel, Weirdness 2 Comments »When I’m travelling on the train, at least once a week I sit near a person who does various crosswords. They’re nothing heavily brain-straining (Actually, that’s just my estimation of the things – I’m sure other people do find them more difficult) as we’re talking about the crosswords in magazines like ‘Take A Break’, ‘Bella’, or whatever.
Anyway, what makes me think every time is that this person gets out a crossword-solving thing (Kind of like this device) where they type out the letters they’ve got, and it returns a list of possible words. And they do this for a good three-quarters of the crossword.
Now maybe this is just me, but where’s the fun in that? If you’re going to do the crossword, fine, do the crossword. If you’re at the end, and completely stumped, fine, use something that’s supplemental to your own vocabulary, brain and/or literacy level.
But somehow using something like that device to answer all the questions, rather than figuring them out for yourself, well I don’t know, but to me that just seems like cheating. But maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.
Seems like cheating to me too, and as the trite hearth wisdom goes it’s only themselves they’re cheating.
Well, I could never work out (pardon the pun) why they allowed the use of calculators in maths lessons – and even some exams. Surely the point is that you can actually do the arithmetic in your head?
Life’s made too easy sometimes.