When crossword clues clash with the Guardian style guide | Chris Elliott: Open door

Our setters don’t rely on ‘lower standards’, as one reader suggested. But we must take care with clues that use terms for people with mental and physical health issues

There are few groups of readers more passionately committed to their patch of the Guardian than the devotees of the crosswords, both quick and cryptic. If the puzzles are just a few minutes late in going up on the paper’s website – normally around midnight every day – the puzzlers are swift to complain, increasingly from abroad, where the crosswords’ audience is growing.

Any error will provoke a stream of emails and telephone calls to the readers’ editor’s office within hours of being spotted. People love to wrestle with the teasing, subtle language of the clues. However, sometimes readers find that language jars, especially when the setter’s clues rely on an aspect of physical or mental health.

Related: When the Royal Cripples hospital became the Royal Orthopaedic we didn’t bin our sticksl | Letters

Continue reading...