Never a cross word

When it comes to doing crossword puzzles, Crossword Coaches Betsy and Paul Cheves believe in their motto — two people working together are better than three people alone.

The duo shared tips that they’ve picked up working on word games with members of the Fellowship Club of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Friday night.

Betsy Cheves, 69, a retired teacher from the Glendale Unified School District, was the first person in her family to get hooked on crossword puzzles, she said. But when her husband, Paul Cheves, a retired director of marketing for a financial firm, saw the challenge and the pleasure his wife was deriving from the word play, he decided to try it.

They do crossword puzzles, they said, because it’s entertaining and the process needs so much concentration, it is a way to escape from life for a while.

“You get into almost a zone,” Betsy Cheves said. The language one learns doing puzzles is called Crosswordeze and it refers to the words that recur over and over in puzzles, Betsy Cheves said.

“Some of them are common words, for example, acre,” she said. “You find it in almost every puzzle. But many of them are not common words and are found only in the puzzles. An example would be the word ‘ort,’ a food scrap — and it’s in almost every puzzle.”

The letters that make up 80% of a puzzle are A, E, L, R, S, T, L, N and D, she said. The four rarely used letters are J, Q, X and Z. The other 20% are the rest of the letters in the alphabet.

Together, they do as many as five puzzles every day. They start out making a copy of the puzzle so each has their own copy. Often, they trade words they are missing, but they never compete.

“The puzzles found in daily newspapers are the easiest on Mondays,” she said. “It takes about five to seven minutes for us to do a puzzle on Mondays. It takes about two hours on Saturdays.”

The couple are self-publishing a book on solving crossword puzzles they hope to release in the early summer.

“We’re publishing a book to get some credibility because we eventually want to teach crossword workshops on cruise ships,” Betsey Cheves said. “To get onto cruise ships, you have to have made 20 presentations on your topic during the calendar year.”

They have been offering their program for free to area service clubs and have gotten an overwhelming response, she said, adding that groups just love a free program.

The majority of the people at Friday’s presentation were inspired to try puzzles after the couple’s presentation.

Harold Entz does between eight to 10 crossword puzzles a week, he said, because they are challenging.

“And my wife is tenacious,” he said.

“She will keep at it. She does them first, then hands them to me. I do some additional words and hand it back to her.”

And they learn a lot of words they’ll probably never use, he said.

“But it’s handy to have them in your vocabulary,” he said.

Jackie Craig hasn’t done crossword puzzles very often, she said, but was inspired to take the hobby up.

“I think the talk was interesting and piqued my interest big time, so I’m going to start,” she said.

But Jacqueline Stark, a professor of literature at Los Angeles Valley College, wasn’t the least bit inspired. She hadn’t done a crossword puzzle in at least five years, she said.

“I do word interpretation for critical thinking and poetry. Doing a crossword puzzle is like having a secret conversation with a lunatic,” she said.

“The word associations are too arbitrary and the time it takes to invest is a waste of time.”