Graham has a short post up mentioning Heidegger's distaste for the crossword puzzle. Given that we have a whole chapter about crosswords and related puzzles in Newsgames, I'm particularly keen to read this if anyone digs it up.

Heidegger's reaction was actually quite common. Some may not realize that the crossword puzzle incited a moral panic when it rose to popularity in the 1920s, one much like later responses to comic books and videogames.

Here's Gratton's take on the matter:

Let me guess: the mechanization of the logos such that the true saying of the legein could not come into the clearing? Or was it just that they tended not to focus on middle German?

Funny though it may be, I suspect Peter's guess at Heidegger's objections may not be too far from the truth (intersecting reserve, perhaps). One of the weird things about the crossword is that it is not really about language, even though it appears to be. Rather it's about comfort. Here's a relevant excerpt from Newsgames:

From the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, puzzles had primarily provided comfort and distraction. Despite early word puzzlers who advocated for their educational benefits, it was the New York Times that solidified the intellectual merits of the puzzle as its primary purpose, unseating comfort as a primary reason for puzzling. But even in the haughty intellectual environment of the Times, [crossword editor Margaret] Farrar had the suspicion that the crossword might serve a purpose beyond, or even before enlightenment. Such is the reason she had dampened the paper's charge in the 1940s to elevate the puzzle to the rest of the publication's high journalistic standards, opting instead for softer though still intellectual fare.

A pattern emerges from Farrar's approach. Even if puzzles don't always provide serenity, they do offer logical consistency. The world is a messy place where solutions often elude one's grasp, but a crossword is always neat and tidy. Michelle Arnot even closes her history of the crossword with such a sentiment: "By presenting a solvable problem, the puzzle offers comfort to a chaotic world." A sense of psychic comfort rises above matters of politics and current events in the minds of crossword constructors and players.

Oh, did I mention you can still preorder the book for $16 or so? Should be out by end of summer.