A new book traces how English developed to become the perfect language for the modern cryptic crossword

With Christmas already invading our high streets may I draw your attention to a delightful new book about English spelling by David Crystal (Spell It Out, Profile Books, £10.39 hardback)? It is not actually concerned with crosswords, but reading it makes clear why English as a language is so suited to the cryptic crossword. (It does not help, though, to explain why our modern cryptic crossword has never really caught on in the American-English world.)

The delight of English for crossword setters is that, because of its mongrel cross-breeding over the centuries, it is a chaotic language in its spelling and pronunciation. Why is the 'ch' in 'chaos' pronounced as a 'k' but not the 'ch' in 'change'? Why did a CHurCH in English become a KirK in Scottish? Why is there a silent 'h' in GHOST, but not in GORSE? How can words with exactly the same spelling, like WIND and SOW, be pronounced entirely differently, have entirely different meanings and, indeed, be different parts of speech? When and why did the old letter called the thorn, representing the sound for 'th' in, for example, THE and looking a bit like a modern 'y', drop out of usage, being retained today only in a phrase like YE OLDE TEASHOP? All this and much more is lucidly and humorously explained in this excellent book, as it traces how our original Germanic Anglo-Saxon coped with the arrival of the Latin alphabet, of the French in 1066, of medieval scribes, of changes in pronunciation, of William Caxton and printing, of Dr Johnson and of the more or less successful efforts of lexicographers over the last 200 years to rationalise the 'system'. It is a system that is chock-a-block with all the anomalies, variations and irregularities that are grist to the cryptic setter's mill.
The book has an interesting final section on the impact of globalisation and the internet on English-English spelling. In business, globalisation has in effect meant Americanisation and that will surely be its consequence here. Until the late 1970s English billions and trillions were a thousand times larger than their American counterparts. The Financial Times, not surprisingly, was the first to give in and switch to the American usage and the rest of the British media soon followed suit. That trend will continue.

The internet, though, introduces a different dimension. In the old days individuals, like Winston Churchill, may have had great difficulty in spelling properly in private correspondence, but in formal letters and published writing in newspapers and books there was always a filter of competent secretaries, subeditors, readers and professional publishers at hand to "correct mistakes", since dictionaries and grammarians laid down what was right and what was wrong. Today the internet, as is increasingly recognised, has completely democratised publishing of all kinds, from blogs to e-books and everything in between. There is no longer any system of formal editing and correction between the writer and the reader. Does it not follow that, if a particular usage or spelling establishes itself in the blogosphere, it will sooner rather than later become recognised as legitimate by the online dictionary editors of this new world (and, for that matter, by crossword editors)?
I still get a steady trickle of cries for help from those who are suddenly told that the puzzle they want up on their screens is not available, or that they cannot get a proper grid to show. The most likely cause is that, for some reason or other, your computer's Java add-on has switched itself off. This can happen, for example, when you upload the latest version of some other software, or when you add a new software toy. So you should check that your Java program (without which the crosswords cannot be read) is still enabled; or, if it has disappeared entirely, you should reload a Java program. If that does not work, please ask for further and more professional advice from userhelp@guardian.co.uk.
On a more general point, while most popular browsers can handle the Guardian crosswords, we are aware that some cannot. If you are having a persistent browser problem it would be worth trying a different browser, for example Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
September Genius puzzle (No 111 set by Enigmatist) attracted the unusually high number of 44 correct answers on the first day (and 316 by the deadline). Dave H. was first past the post at 01:26, again followed by Ian at 01:36. The first in from abroad were PS from Australia at 02:50 and NJS from New Zealand at 04:00.

Congratulations to Jay Bentley, who is September's winner.
