Some of the contestants, Pratt said, were making up puzzles of their own. He said he saw you were a mathematician and he needs mathematical help with a project he's doing, some king of 10-year study on lottery numbers. It was this guy with a lottery association. "I hate to interrupt," said Linda Pratt after one call, "but this one.
Puns about crosswords tv#
Monday night, as the Pratts waited with Linda's visiting grandmother for the Baltimore TV segment to come on, the phone was relentless. Pratt is organizing an invitational in Nassau. "īut Scrabble even takes them on vacation. "There are some fields too," Pratt offered ruefully, "but the last time I got this awful allergic reaction. Beyond work and Scrabble - Pratt heads a club in Laurel - he and Linda read and "walk around the neighborhood to look at the new houses." "We routed that to the pay phone," he noted carefully.īy and large, the Pratts' lives seem quiet and (eight-letter word that means serene and is a Scrabble bonanza). His win brought a flood of media attention and even, he said rather shocked, calls to his office "where they don't like you to take personal calls." One, even, was a New York radio station wanting a taped interview on the spot. Pratt, who is 29, met his wife in a carpool. "At least," she said, "you don't bring your job home with you. His wife, Linda, also works for DOD at Meade. The son of a carpenter in Abington, Mass., Pratt now is a mathematician for the Department of Defense at Fort Meade. (They mean clockwise and counterclockwise.) Not quite believing it, he looked it up elsewhere and found that its antonym was "widdershins." So when they turned up on the crossword, he was home free. He was browsing, he said, "in the official Scrabble dictionary" and ran across "deasil". And it was Scrabble that really did it for him. But words like "deasil" and "widdershins" are probably what catapulted him to the top. "Of course I knew the root was 'ror' and when the last letter turned out to be a 'c' of course I knew it was 'r-o-r-i-c." And of course it was.īecause "i'm not too good at movies," Pratt didn't do too well with the "Fractured Movies" puzzle. like a five-letter word for "dewy" that was in one of the seven puzzles which eliminated all but three of the 100 or so contestants at Stamford. "I do much better," said Pratt, "with obscure real words". "I don't really go for those," said the balding, bespectacled Pratt, sitting in the cozy living room of his South Laurel, Md., townhouse.Pratt is a mathematician and linguist, with degrees from MIT (math) and Georgetown University (linguistics). In the championship playoff puzzle, the clue for nine down was "self-explanatory." He will defend this position of (a seven-letter word meaning "superiority in achievement") on the next two weekends in Baltimore. What the pros call "Scrabble Cross Word Game." In fact, although he won $300 by placing first at the Crossword tourney, he is much more enthusiastic about being the Maryland State Scrabble champion for the past two years. "(It took him not quite four minutes to waste the daily Balitmore Sun puzzle for benefit of a TV news crew Monday morning.) Hasn't done them in years, he says, ever since he found he was knocking off the Sunday Washington Post puzzle in less than eight minutes. but you can't be sure."ĭaniel Pratt is really off crossword puzzles. Pratt thinks that he "probably would have seen that eventually. None of the three finalists at last weekend's Third Annual Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Conn., got it, although winer Daniel L.
"Point Counterpoint," of course, you think. A Huxley title and part of "60 Minutes" in nine letters.
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