A football matchday programme might seem an odd starting point for a piece about puzzles, but may come as no surprise to anyone who read this great story from last week about a hidden message inserted into a piece by Luton Town Football Club director, Stephen Browne. In case you missed it, Browne took the opportunity in his “From the Boardroom” segment to insert an acrostic, in which the first letter of each sentence made up a poorly concealed jibe at local rivals Watford: “Watford are s**t.” Pithy stuff, indeed.
Concealed messages such as this have long been a feature of puzzles. Acrostics have a very long history, dating back to the prophecies of Sybil, which were written on leaves in such a way that the first letters spelled a word. This ties in with the etymology of the word, which comes from the Greek akros, meaning “at the end”, and stichos, meaning “line”.
Religious writings over the years have proved a rich source of acrostics, with several psalms featuring them. Perhaps the most famous one of all is found in Greek, where the phrase which translates to the English “Jesus Christ, God’s son, saviour” has initial letters spelling ICHTHYS, meaning “fish”. In more recent years, authors including Poe, Nabokov and Lewis Carroll have used them to good effect.
Of course, Stephen Browne is by no means the first person to use an acrostic to convey a message that may otherwise not get published. In 2009, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor of California, sent a note in which the first letters of seven lines spelled an instruction starting with the letter F and ending with “you”. Television presenter James May was fired from Autocar magazine for something similar.
Sneaking acrostics into puzzles, especially crosswords, is something that also has a long history. Sometimes this is done for thematic effect, such as in January’s Toughie Crossword 3,000, in which the first letters of clues spelled “Three-thousandth Toughie Crossword”. On other occasions a compiler may do it just for their own amusement, or for personal reasons. Here’s where I must own up to having, almost 20 years ago, inserted into a cryptic crossword an acrostic containing a birthday message to my wife. Not that she noticed, but that’s another story.
The fear of anybody editing puzzles is that a compiler may attempt to place an acrostic or other message in one of their creations that isn’t seen during the editorial process and then causes controversy. Scanning clues and grids for this sort of thing is something that we do as standard, alongside all of the other checks we make on our puzzles.
If you think it’s impossible to avoid noticing a hidden feature like this in a piece of text, then we’ll leave you with a simple question:
Can you spot the acrostic in this article? Leave a comment below if you think you’ve spotted it.
