A Puzzling Secret Identity

Driving around campus, you might spot a car with a distinctive bumper sticker: “I ❤️ My Thesaurus.” Who’s driving this word-mobile? College Park man of mystery Steven Blakely—better known as Stephen Roth, the new dean of the University of Maryland’s Graduate School.

The pseudonym is the one Roth uses to devise acrostics, a chess-not-checkers approach to word puzzles. It’s not the same-named style of poem where the first letter of each line spells a message; instead, it’s a mind-bending take on a crossword in which clues lead to words that then spell out a phrase, depicted in a puzzle above. Roth has written two books of acrostic puzzles, one based on presidential inaugural addresses and one on movie quotes, under his pen name. (They’re sold on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and through his own website).

“Crossword puzzles are probably the most common relative of them, but there’s just a little different kind of complexity to acrostic puzzles that I think is unique,” Roth said. “You know whether you got it right at the end because the quote makes sense, hopefully.”

Roth has long loved games and puzzles, from his daily Wordle to the party game Code Names, but it was his wife, Blakely Pomietto, who introduced him to acrostics when she gave him a book of the puzzles several years ago. “I thought, how do you go about making these puzzles?” he said. “That intrigued me, and somewhere along the line I decided this would be a fun thing to do.”

To create the puzzles, Roth uses “a big box of Scrabble tiles” to spell out the typically 170ish-character phrase. Then, he mixes them up and turns them into other words “that are completely unrelated to your quote—those become the pathway to solving” the puzzle, he said. “The fun is coming up with interesting words out of all those Scrabble tiles and interesting clues that will lead people to solving those clues.”

[A Smithsonian Instrumental: Music Lecturer Oversees Instruments Collection at National Museum of American History]