I get annoyed when movies and television shows dabble in my areas of expertise and get the details wrong-- especially when getting them right would have been so easy. Case in point: last night's Stargate: SG-1.
The opening shot is of O'Neill shaving in his bathroom mirror. Clipped to the mirror is a cryptic crossword puzzle. We know it's a cryptic for two reasons: the grid is a cryptic-style grid, with words intersecting at every other letter instead of on every letter; and the title of the page is "CRYPTIC CROSSWORD" (aside: because I'm a geek, I freeze-framed to see what the entries in the grid were. The clues were too small to read and the entries were difficult to discern, but it was pretty clear that they made no sense. Most of the filled-in answers weren't even words).
A few minutes later O'Neill triumphantly hands the completed grid to Carter, with whom he had a bet about being able to complete it. From Carter's reaction, it's obvious O'Neill's blown it (explaining the nonsense entries?). Specifically, Carter says, "The clue for 29 across is 'Atomic weight of Boron.' The answer is TEN. You wrote FAT." That's not a cryptic clue, that's a traditional crossword clue. That clue would never have been part of the puzzle we saw.
In England, a "crossword" is a cryptic crossword, while an "American crossword" is the kind with which we're more familiar. Is the same true in Canada? Was this a case of the script-- written by an American-- calling for a "crossword puzzle", not realizing that the term would mean something different to the Vancouver prop team?
Posted by Peter at March 13, 2004 12:02 PMi just asked a canadian. he said they use the american terms.
Posted by: dana on March 13, 2004 12:35 PMI'm Canadian and we use the terms in the same way that Americans do.
Posted by: greg on March 14, 2004 12:45 AM