Whose Faulty Vision

Dental Crossword

I just want to gloat about a recent crossword puzzle triumph, possibly my greatest yet.

A little background for my readers who aren’t regular crossworders: Your typical daily crossword puzzle includes 3 or 4 long answers that share a common theme, which is usually hinted at in the title of the puzzle. Sometimes instead of a theme, the long answers form a single quotation. In that case, you often have no information about the quotation aside from whatever’s hinted at in the title–the clues will simply say “Quotation, part 1″, “Quotation, part 2″ and so on. You have to work it out from cross words.

So this puzzle was one of those. The clues were just “Quip, part 1″ through “Quip, part 3″. I don’t remember the title exactly, but it had something to do with dentistry. I had managed to work out all of “Quip, part 1″, which was “BE TRUE TO YOUR”. I also got the word “WILL” at the tail end of “Quip, part 2″. I had nothing of part 3 except for the number of letters. And from that, I was able to guess, letter-for-letter, the correct answer, which turned out to be…

do you want to guess it?

Don’t look ahead just yet, then.

It turned out to be…

“BE TRUE TO YOUR TEETH OR THEY WILL BE FALSE TO YOU”

I was pretty pleased that I got that from so little information. Maybe I’ve been doing too many crossword puzzles.