I wasn’t actually trying to solve some fancy puzzle that day, trust me. I was sitting in the DMV office, absolute hell on earth, waiting for my number to be called. I’d been there since 7 AM. My ticket number looked like it belonged to another geological epoch. I pulled out my old newspaper crosswords—the ones I usually skip because they’re too fancy and rely on knowledge of opera or something—just to keep from throwing my phone at the wall.
Everything was fine at first, mostly just standard three-letter words for ‘river’ or ‘Greek letter’ filler. Then I slammed into it. It was 11 Down. The clue read: Tarot Suit, four letters, often linked to passion (4). Four letters. I knew instantly it was pointing toward the Minor Arcana suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles.
My first thought was “Wands.” Nope, five letters. “Cups.” Nope. “Swords,” “Pents,” nothing fit the character count or the theme of the actual physical word. I tried thinking about the elements. Fire? Water? Earth? Too long, or already used elsewhere in the puzzle. I spent twenty minutes staring at those four empty squares, convinced the crossword creator was just an elitist prick who demanded a PhD in esoteric card reading just to finish the damn puzzle.
I went ballistic. I tried every single synonym I could muster. I started trying to shorten the suit names. WAND, CUPP, SWOR—no. That’s not how crosswords work. I started trying to work backwards from surrounding words, filling in things I wasn’t totally sure about, hoping the letters would force the solution. They didn’t. They just made the whole grid look like a battlefield where I lost badly.
I knew the answer was staring me right in the face, but my brain was stuck thinking way too complicated. I was trying to map out the entire spiritual significance of the suit when I should have just been looking for a basic noun. It was exactly like that time I tried to fix the busted washing machine—I tore out the whole circuit board when all it needed was a quick filter clean. Overthinking kills puzzle solving, and it definitely kills appliance repair.
The Moment I Realized We Were Thinking Too Hard
My number finally got called—10:45 AM, three hours later. I shove the paper in my bag, totally defeated. I get my license renewed, pay the insane fees, and walk out into the sunlight. I’m standing there, totally relieved, waiting for the bus, when I pull the crossword back out for one last look, just out of spite. I wasn’t going to let that one clue beat me.
I started thinking about how these puzzles are actually designed. They rely on common knowledge, not expert knowledge. If they use a super technical word—like one related to Tarot or heraldry—they usually rely on the simplest, most fundamental synonym for the category. They want the object, not the metaphysical concept.
I looked at the clue again: Tarot Suit, four letters, often linked to passion (4). We know passion is linked to Wands (Fire). So, the answer is a four-letter synonym for “Wand” or “Staff.”
I had been fixed on finding Wands or Cups. I needed to identify the physical item the suit represented, and find its simplest four-letter name.
- Wands are sticks. Staffs.
- Cups are bowls. Vessels.
- Swords are blades. Edges.
- Pentacles are discs. Coins.
I started testing the four-letter options against Wands/Staffs.
I already had a couple of letters faintly penciled in from my disastrous earlier attempts. I had an ‘R’ in the second slot and a ‘D’ in the third slot, based on two intersecting words I was about 60% sure about. That gave me: _ R D _. No common four-letter synonym for a wand fit that mess. The intersecting words were clearly wrong. My whole grid was polluted.
I erased everything. Clean slate. Total reset. This is the only way to solve it when you’ve gone down a rabbit hole of bad assumptions.
I went back to the object. A stick used for walking or magic. Staff. Wand. What four-letter word is commonly used in literature for a staff?
I started listing: POLE, CLUB, AXEL, CUBE… none of them felt right for the esoteric feel, even if they were simple. Then it hit me, linking the simple object back to the suit name itself, but simplified. The suit is named Wands. What is another, simpler name for a wand that begins with R and ends with S (a common plural for these puzzle creators)?
The answer had to be RODS. Rods are staffs. Rods are wands. Rods are four letters. I slotted it in. R-O-D-S. Suddenly, every single intersecting word popped into place. The word above it, which I’d been stuck on, worked. Everything cleared up instantly.
The whole problem wasn’t my lack of knowledge about the Minor Arcana. It was my assumption that the crossword required specific tarot jargon. It didn’t. It required the plainest English synonym for the physical object represented by Wands: Rods.
If you get stuck on an obscure, specialized topic in a crossword, stop trying to find the esoteric answer. Stop looking for the five-letter, specialized name used by experts. Instead, identify the object category—in this case, “Staffs” or “Sticks”—and find the most common, boring, four-letter synonym for it. Swords often become BLADES (6), Cups sometimes become BOWLS (5) or VESSEL (6), but Wands? They are frequently simplified right down to RODS.
I solved the puzzle in two seconds after three hours of mental wrestling, right there waiting for the bus. The DMV was hell, but it taught me something important: when dealing with difficult, specialized clues, they rarely want the expert term. They want the dirt-simple, common noun that an eight-year-old would use to describe the object. It’s not about brilliance; it’s about spotting the obvious, practical word they defaulted to. Next time you see a tough suit clue, stop thinking card meanings. Think basic hardware. You’re welcome.
