Grandma mastered crosswords, so what’s with kids?

Today’s question: My great-grandmother had an eighth-grade education, and she did the daily crossword puzzle quickly and well. My grandchildren who have college educations refuse to tackle the puzzles because “the puzzles are too difficult.” Are today’s puzzles harder to solve than those of my great-grandmother’s time?

I know a lot of you people do crosswords and that some of you people take them very serious so I bet I am going to hear from a lot of you about this one. That’s going to be especially so because I don’t have a very good, definite answer.

Crosswords have been around for a long time. The first known published crossword puzzle was created by a journalist named Arthur Wynne and appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913. It set off a crossword craze and within a decade, almost every paper in the United States ran one. If you’d like to take a crack at that first one, go to crosswordtournament.com.

There might be several reasons why your great-grandmother could outdo your grandchildren at crosswords.

For one thing, there are a lot more puzzles and lot more styles of crosswords at all sorts of skill levels and all sorts of different cultural references than there used to be.

And there are a lot more crossword creators than there used to be. You can easily go online and find a template to make your own crossword.

And I’m not sure of the proof for this, but I believe some people have crossword minds and some don’t. Maybe it’s a left-brain, right-brain kind of thing or like math phobias.