Before we can decode a written text or spoken comments, we often need a deep understanding of the context. The literal meaning of the words often does not give us enough to decipher the intended meaning.
I found myself thinking about this after reading the following:
‘Man of the match in space on heading in goal’
A first sight, this seems to be something to do with a football match, although if you try to read it literally you will soon realise that it does not quite seem coherent. The source of this odd collection of words explains its lack of coherence. It is a clue in a cryptic crossword.
How does this clue work?
Cryptic crossword clues typically have 2 components (which sometimes overlap):
- a definition of the answer
- instructions for assembling the answer.
The newspaper told me that the required answer has 5 letters.
I soon spotted 2 things in the clue:
- the word heading could be an instruction to use the first letter of goal.
- this style of crossword often uses the word match as a slightly cryptic synonym for ‘marriage’ or ‘wedding’. So, man of the match could refer to a man involved in a wedding.
These 2 ideas led me quickly to the answer. The man most obviously involved in a wedding is the groom. Groom is a 5-letter word and the last 4 letters (room) mean ‘space’.
So, the definition part of the clue is ‘man of the match’. The instruction part of the clues tells the reader to take a synonym for space (room) and add it to (put it on) the 1st letter of goal. The answer is groom.
What this clue told me about meaning
I could never have deciphered this collection of words without:
- knowing that it was from a cryptic crossword;
- being reasonably familiar with the conventions of cryptic crosswords in general, and with the general approach of the crosswords in this particular newspaper;
- knowning how many words were in the required answer.
The words assembled into this particular clue were carefully designed to look superficially like words conveying some meaning in the real world. These particular words looked at first sight somewhat like some commentary on a football match, though if you look more closely the surface meaning is quite elusive. It is only possible to find the real meaning by digging below the surface with the aid of background knowledge—in this case, knowledge of the genre (cryptic crossword) and of the conventions of that genre.
This example is rather specialised, but I draw a general lesson from it. There are many other cases where the normal surface meanings of the words do not, by themselves, give the reader or listener enough information to decode the intended meaning. It is often important to rely heavily on various kinds of background information.