A 14-Letter-Word For Bernice Gordon
Tuesday 3 February 2015 • 1:54 AM
This past Friday, the Times published a wonderfully creative obituary for one Bernice Gordon, a 101-year-old cruciverbalist.
Quite a remarkable woman, considering:
[i]n the 1960s, she caused a small sensation by introducing the rebus puzzle. Such a puzzle might require solvers to replace the sequence “a-n-d” with an ampersand, for instance, as in SC&INAVIA and CARMENMIR&A. One ampers&-laden puzzle by Mrs. Gordon, published in The New York Times in 1965, split the crossword community in ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ (Clemens cognomen), leaving some readers spellbound and others scandalized.
To those not versed in crossword puzzles, that’s quite an accomplishment. Almost akin to being the computer hardware engineer who says “Hey, why don’t we put two buttons on the mouse?”
Sadly, Mrs. Gordon’s passing has made the puzzling world a little less cryptic.