JUMBLE Editorial Policy as a Mirror of Modern Society

I like to do the JUMBLE puzzle in the newspaper, located on the comics page. JUMBLE, that scrambled word game. As time goes on there seem to be fewer and fewer comic strips I care to read ( a definite exception being Mutts by Patrick McDonnell, which I never skip), but every single day for the past twenty-some years I have taken the JUMBLE challenge.

I don't bother with the last part of the puzzle, in which you have to arrange certain highlighted letters from the first part of the puzzle in order to form some funny, punny phrase. I prefer to do the first part of the puzzle on sight and never write anything down.

The daily puzzle consists of four words to unscramble, while the Sunday puzzle is comprised of six longer words. I figure out each scambled word in about one second or less, although there are some that take longer to register and a few that stump me entirely. By the way, unscrambling a word in a second is no measure of intelligence but rather just a matter of recognition and familiarity; after twenty-blank years, I've seen all the words already!

In all my time I have seen the puzzle writer make only one mistake, but it is a recurring mistake that pops up about once each year. Here, I'll let you have a try. Go ahead and unscramble the letters CMIANA. I'll wait over here quietly.

Now if you came up with the word maniac as your solution, good for you. That's exactly what the puzzle writer was hoping you'd come up with. But what if you came up with caiman, a different but perfectly fine word? The puzzle writer says you're wrong, that's what. Look and/or listen here.

For a JUMBLE to work properly, there must be exactly one word that the given letters unscramble into, but that is not the case with CMIANA. Three separate times in three different years I wrote a letter to point out this correction, hoping that CMIANA would be taken out of rotation and JUMBLE would be perfect forever after. Well, one time I received a reply consisting of equivocal mumbo jumbo from a junior assistant editor at The Chicago Tribune, and another time I received a flier from JUMBLE, Inc. apprising me that a plethora of JUMBLE-related merchandise was available for purchase. Unfortunately, I have come to accept that my correction is unwanted and I don't write letters about it anymore. Does it speak well or ill of society when those in charge choose to ignore the indisputable corrections of their constituents?

And another thing. Through the years the solution to the daily JUMBLE puzzle has historically been printed in the following day's newspaper. Last month, though, something new was tried; the answers to the day's puzzle were printed the same day and, in fact, on the same page. It is not within my purview as to whether this was a nationwide experiment or if it was a bright idea concocted by another junior assistant editor at The Chicago Tribune.

The experiment/bright idea lumbered along for one or two weeks, but then came another change. Effective immediately, an annotation explained, the answers to that day's puzzle would be printed on a different page, a few pages away. Now what does this transition say about our society? Are we a city/nation of cheaters who can't be trusted even to think through a thoroughly inconsequential game without peeking at the answer?

The revised experiment/bright idea slammed to a screeching halt after one or two more weeks. Again effective immediately, another annotation explained, the answers to the daily JUMBLE puzzle would once again be printed the following day. The game was returned to the status quo ante bellum. The whole episode was nothing more than a tempest in a teapot, much like this blog post.