IT'S A GAME:

For decades the people making decisions about what should be in a puzzle have been straight white men according to Taussig, who said crosswords were a "very much elite, hyper educated, white, New York City thing, where if you didn't know chess and your classics you were screwed."

When Shortz became editor of The Times crossword in 1993, things began to change. Shortz brought pop culture into crosswords, Taussig said. Yet Shortz doesn't always get it right. A few years ago, Shortz included the word "beaner" in a puzzle. "It's baseball slang for a ball that hits the batter's head. But it's also, as I did not know at the time, an offensive term for Hispanics," he said. "There was a lot of anger over that."

Even Sharp, who is one of Shortz's biggest critics, said that "Shortz changed the New York Times, radically in terms of how fun it was...turning away from being a test about arcane knowledge and toward a kind of playful, wordplay-oriented kind of puzzle."

Although crossword constructors and solvers are overwhelmingly left-wing--Shortz surveyed attendees of his American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in March 2017 and found that close to 90 percent voted for Clinton--there is no consensus among editors, podcasters, and solvers on what should be included in a puzzle.

So how do constructors decide what's in and what's out? Patrick Berry, a constructor whose puzzles have appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, said that he strives to keep his puzzles "apolitical," which is difficult. "It becomes an endless series of judgment calls. Is this slang term offensive? Is that world leader merely unpleasant, or too toxic to even mention?" Berry said.

While there are some answers that constructors and solvers all agreed were objectionable, such as racial slurs, the community is divided on other types of clues. Berry thinks that mainstream crosswords shouldn't have "Curse words, certain bodily functions...notorious figures like Harvey Weinstein [because] puzzles are meant to be entertaining, and that stuff generally isn't." Yet omitting these terms is a political choice as well. Some people (me) find curse words and bodily functions very entertaining, and who counts as a notorious figure is up for debate. While Berry won't put references to Nazis in his puzzles, not everyone feels that way.

Shortz will include Nazi if it is clued in a non-offensive way. "I've had Nazi in the puzzle a number of times. But usually I clued it Raiders of the Lost Ark villain...or 'Soup Nazi' from Seinfeld," he said. A reference to notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, however, caused him to reject a puzzle. "I just found that so offensive, that I just didn't want that in the New York Times crossword," Shortz said.

In response to the "beaner" incident, the Times created a diversity panel that reads over every crossword to find terms that could cause offense. "The standard we use now...is, taken out of context, is the answer, something that is likely to offend people," Shortz said.

Recently the panel flagged "pig," because its clue was "gluttonous." "One of the people...objected to that ...because in their mind, it suggested fat shaming," he said. "And I went to the dictionary...gluttonous is basically one who overeats. It's not a matter of fat shaming," he claimed." It's just what the word means." But he took the word out so as not to offend readers.

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