The joy of a crossword

In these days of app driven pleasures, somewhere the younger one discovered the pleasure of the crossword. I think it is serendipity because the crossword appears on the page that she tries her hand at other puzzles and one fine day, she decided to tackle the crossword. And I was called to help.

I am an old lover of the crossword. I never quite figured the cryptic crossword beyond a few clues despite my best efforts, but a typical word crossword is something I absolutely adore.

The joy of finding a word in bits and pieces, trying out a word, swapping something - it is fun - plus it increases general knowledge and vocabulary. Though those are side benefits - the sheer joy of words is what the crossword enables.

Plus nowadays, google helps if we get a little stuck. So, there we are the two of us, pondering over, a word for the crowd with pitchforks or a sailors cry for help or a sanctuary for lions and absolutely enjoying every moment of solving the crossword.

And now inspired, we are looking at tackling the cryptic crossword.

Comments

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this. I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery. The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true, I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call

Serendipity and Learning

Search This Blog