cruciverbalist

There is no doubt that Evan Birnholz is a brilliant professional cruciverbalist, who deserves a more focused and sophisticated audience with respect to crossword puzzles.

If doing the Saturday crossword in pen seems like a magic trick, prepare yourself for David Kwong, a conjurer and a cruciverbalist.

“My mom. Her name is Siobhan, and she’s a cruciverbalist.”

As she put it at the 2004 conference, she became a translator “by pure accident,” although her interest in literature began early, in a bookish household where her mother was a homemaker, her father was a cruciverbalist who devised puzzles for the Times of London, and her grandfather was a deputy editor of the Observer newspaper who steered her toward his Loeb collection of Greek and Latin classics.

Mrs. Gordon was The Times’s oldest cruciverbalist, as those who ply her trade are known, and its longest-serving.