Square Theory

Summary

The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk about words that cross each other. Square roots We direct our attention toward the #etuiposting channel, Crosscord’s designated space for shitposting (so named because ETUI, a sewing case, is a prototypically shitty piece of crosswordese). There, one afternoon in January 2022, crossword constructor and Crossword Nexus warden Alex Boisvert posted what seemed at the time to be an innocuous, mildly interesting observation: Suffice to say, the Crosscord hivemind had other examples of this. Will Nediger replied a few minutes later with the clever MULTITOOL and MULTIPLIERS (words with completely unrelated meanings, despite the fact that PLIERS are a TOOL). Several messages later, Alex chimed back in with the elegant PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM, a pairing that had been used in some form in crosswords by constructors Christopher Adams (2018) and Robyn Weintraub (2021). Something about this concept—two sets of synonyms (PUB and BAR, QUIZ and EXAM), which when paired together, form phrases that themselves are not synonyms (PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM)—captured the minds of Crosscord. Suddenly, the floodgates were open. Intermittently over the next year, #etuiposting would be flooded with these pairs of pairs. They became too much even for the shitposting channel, and were ultimately confined to a thread called #double-doubles (a name Bob Weisz and I both proposed simultaneously). Today, more than three years after Alex’s original prompt, the thread still remains active, a wordplay oasis of over 3,000 posts. There’s something going on here. Something more than a shitpost or an ephemeral trend. Double doubles have the proverbial juice, and the juice lies in their structure. E...