In England (at least), someone who designs crossword puzzles is called a “crossword setter.” There was one crossword setter — you can find his work in the Guardian newspaper online — who goes by two names. His given name is “Donald Putnam”, and he created puzzles called quiptic crosswords. According to the newspaper, that’s “a simple cryptic designed for novices.”
Putnam’s other nom de crosswords is Logodaedalus, and the puzzles published under that persona are particularly problematic. They’re so difficult that you can find blog entries discussing the clues and how solvers either figured them out or gave up in defeat.
But “logodaedalus” is also a word. Or at least it was a word. It comes from Greek roots and means “one who is cunning in words.” In 1611, when “logodaedalus” enjoyed at least some degree of use, Thomas Coryate used it in Coryats Crudities (a pretty modern-sounding title for 1611): “He is a great and bold Carpenter of words, or (to expresse him in one like his owne) a Logodædale.”
The “logo” part of the word comes from the Greek word for “word,” “logos”. The second part is based on Daedalus, the mythical builder of the labyrinth where the Minotaur was trapped, and also the human-powered-flight contraption that his son Icarus crashed (this was before it was understood that when you fly higher it gets colder, not hotter).
By the end of the 1600s, “logodaedalus” seems to have run its course; no citations have been found after that. But in 1727, Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary published the similar “logodaedalist,” which it defined as “an Inventer or Forger of new Words, and strange Terms.” “Logodaedalist” appears again in 1806, in another dictionary.
The myth of Daedalus also gave English the word “daedal” — another one that’s vanishingly obscure and probably obsolete, but was coined by a genuine logodaedalist. It was the poet Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene in 1590: “All were it Zeuxis or Praxitcles: His dædale hand would faile, and greatly faynt.”
It’s hard to tell from that quotation, but “daedal” meant “skillful” or “an inventor.” Spenser used the word again in The Second Part of the Faerie Queen in 1596: “Then doth the dædale earth throw forth to thee Out of her fruitfull lap aboundant flowres.”
In the second instance, I think Spenser meant something more like “of the earth” or “varied.” “Daedal” has been used since, but almost entirely by poets. There was a time when one of the self-assigned jobs of a poet was to show off their erudite vocabulary. Aptly enough, one of the Daedalus-inspired words — “logodaedalus” — has recently reappeared, and sure enough, it’s in poetry. John Blackmore, based in Somerset, England, has written a “modern-day epic poem” called Logodaedalus. You can find it online if you enjoy lines like “Oh Muse, let not my young years be dismissed,” but I really can’t recommend it, even though you might enjoy “altitudes of Aeolian awe.” I have to wonder whether a bit of audience analysis might have improved that project.
There is (or was) also an abandoned blog on the internet called “logodaedalic.” It’s a “blogspot” blog (remember that service?) and I think it still exists only because Google doesn’t bother to delete data, even if nobody has visited those pages in years. It’s sort of like Google has digidaedalically constructed a new kind of labyrinth of Crete, but one just for words that can never escape.
