2024-02-01 12:49:28
Twenty definitions and the help of syllables to form words. That was the format of the first Claringrilla, which was printed on the last page of the newspaper on April 22, 1965. The big objective was to put together a sentence with the columns where the third and fifth letters of each word were located.
Today, almost 59 years later, you have to complete 19 words, help with syllables is still available, you must also form a sentence and technology allows you to ask for help on social networks with a difficult word. In all its versions, the classic that has gone through 20,000 editions continues to challenge readers.
“Pastime that consists of filling in the squares of a grid with letters so that they form, horizontally and vertically, the words determined by given definitions” is the meaning of crossword puzzle for the Royal Spanish Academy. However, mental challenge is the first concept they mention Miguel Ángel Bella, Osvaldo Mignoli and Raquel Terragnothree Claringrilla veterans, when they explain why this game attracts them.
“I have completed Claringrilla since the end of May 2010, which is as far as I could access it in the files available online. And I have completed it, well, who knows? Like a game, like a passion, like a waste of time. Or not, for me it’s not a waste of time. For me it is a mental exercise. I take it from that place, and I do it every day as soon as I wake up. It is the first section of the newspaper I go to.” The speaker is Miguel Ángel Bella, a 62-year-old lawyer who lives in Villa Urquiza, City of Buenos Aires.
Mates, three or four water crackers with low-fat white cheese or light jam and the newspaper, now almost always online and sometimes on paper. This is what his mornings are like. He shares comments about reading the newspaper with his wife Claudia, a teacher, but Claringrilla is a task that he faces alone.
“It’s mental gymnastics. One reaches an age in which the oiled machine, working, is better than the still, inert machine,” she reflects. An experienced reader, he boasts of not resorting to insults when speaking: “I’m not one to use swear words. Spot. That comes to me from childhood itself, and my mother, whose name was Rosa, is present there.”
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Miguel Ángel Bella is a lawyer by profession, he played with Diego Maradona in Argentinos Juniors and has completed almost 13,000 claringrillas.
The definitions that are most difficult for him are those that hide locations from distant parts of the world: “The other day Nanchang came out, a city in China, for example, which was already used in previous editions.” Beyond that, he feels that he can easily solve the rest of the crossword puzzles.
Fans of Clarín’s flagship game say it is “mental gymnastics.”
A fan of Argentinos Juniors, a regular at local games, he inherited his passion from his eldest son Laureano (36), a sports journalist. And to her three children — she also has Brenda (35) and Valentina (16) — she instilled in them her love for reading. He is a declared admirer of Miguel Wiñazki, and a follower of the texts of Jorge Lanata, Eduardo van der Kooy, Santiago Fioriti and Nicolás Wiñazki.
Socialize at all ages
A thesaurus is a dictionary, catalog or ordered anthology of data. The term comes from the Latin thesaurus, and this in turn from the classical Greek thēsaurós. This was the concept that the graduate incorporated Maria Veronica Lapellestaff psychologist and deputy head of the Psychiatry Service at the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires, in an exchange exercise with a colleague in her work group.
“We develop recreational and mental agility activities, which we call cognitive stimulation, for our patients. Before implementing them, we test them to see if they work and see what things come into play,” explains Lapelle, who, among other responsibilities, is in charge of coordinating the Psychogeriatrics team.
“In an activity of my work team, each of us had to put together a crossword puzzle with all the coordinates so that someone else could solve it. In that interaction, I was given one that a colleague who works in research and bibliographic search methodology had made.” He learned something new, that’s what he highlighted from that exercise: “We tell our patients a lot to interact with others because In that interaction one expands one’s cognitive capitalexpands their conceptual capital and that interaction generates a lot of motivation.”
Psychologist María Verónica Lapelle recommends crossword puzzles to activate the mind.
He decided to replicate this experience in his role as a professor of Psychology at the University of El Salvador. The assignment for her students is to create a crossword puzzle with words that refer to essential concepts of the subject. In this way, “they activate their mind, put their conceptual capital and cognitive resources into play, and continue learning.” She is also a professor of Medicine, Biomedical Engineering and Nursing at the University Institute of the Italian Hospital
Enhancing skills or delaying aging or deterioration associated with a specific disease are the main objectives of cognitive stimulation. “Everything linked to higher cognitive functions—memory capacity, attention, concentration, executive functions, language, social cognition—has a direct influence on social adaptability. Therefore, for us they are essential in treatment planning,” said Lapelle.
There are several possible applications of cognitive stimulation exercises. In addition to treatments for older adults and pedagogical exercises, two others can be added: as a psychological evaluation tool and vocational guidance.
As a staff psychologist, Lapelle also addresses these issues: “In some specific mental health pathologies, these exercises help the patient have a more comprehensive recovery and better adaptability to the environment. In addition, we work a lot with cognitive stimulation and mental agility games in everything related to vocational guidance, to enhance and develop academic adaptability skills.”
young mind
Phrases are his thing rather than single words. Osvaldo Mignoli He lives with his wife Claudia in Lanús Oeste, province of Buenos Aires, he worked for about 19 years as an electromechanical technician for a maintenance contracting company and has been retired for 14 months.
He doesn’t remember exactly how long ago it was that every morning, while he had his coffee with milk and bran crackers for breakfast, he completed the Claringrilla. She estimates that between 15 and 20 years passed. She started with the paper diary, and now plays the online version.
“It’s entertainment. It is a way to keep the mind active,” says Osvaldo, 66 years old. “Youth, divine treasure, you are leaving never to return!” is the phrase he remembers most. It belongs to the poem Autumn song in spring by Nicaraguan Rubén Darío.
For the psychologist Silvana Weckesser: “All knowledge that one adds helps cognitive processes. It is recommended that older people learn something new to stimulate the connection between neurons. Games in general, especially concentration games like crossword puzzles or sudoku, are good for improving memory and promoting problem solving. These exercises stimulate the brain and promote mental health.”
Silvana Weckesser highlights the importance of socializing during the game.
Like his colleague from the Italian Hospital, he emphasized the game as a tool to share with others: “Mental agility games present a challenge and provide the opportunity to interact with others to, for example, ask them if they know the word that goes with that definition. Playfulness, creativity and sociability are encouraged.”
Weckesser—who wrote the book Recalculating: you also learn to be an adultpublished by the publishing house Hojas del Sur—commented that these types of games are also a tool to treat anxiety because they allow you to concentrate on a specific task, reduce stress, obtain a feeling of achievement and work on frustration tolerance.
A life with science, travel and words
“I like diarrhea-producing bacteria because they cover all three fields: animals, food and humans. So, you can work with veterinarians, doctors and food technologists. Bacteria have a first and last name. What we did in Malbrán was look for the last name. “We studied salmonella and had to identify what salmonella it was.”
Raquel Terragno He dedicated 25 of his 78 years to the Bacteriology department of the Malbrán Institute. She is now retired and lives with her husband Antonio, a chemist who worked his entire life in the pharmaceutical industry.
This microbiologist graduated from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA remembers that every day when she returned from the laboratory, she came home and solved a Claringrilla: “I like games that challenge. I want to test how much I know, how much I don’t know and in the process I incorporate words that I didn’t know. I love all that. I make as many as I can, even the old ones because on the web I can find ones from up to 10 years ago.”
Seneschal, this is what the senior butler of the royal house is called in some countries, and this is one of the words that challenged Raquel, who is always looking for new challenges. To Claringrilla, she adds crucinumbers and literary grids: “And now I got hooked on the game ‘The Eight Errors’. I love it, the difference is so subtle.”
Is reading Belgrano. The great Argentine patriot, a book by one of his favorite authors, Daniel Balmaceda. She is a fan of fictionalized stories, and she read one of the ones she liked the most several years ago. Is about The green stone hearta novel by Salvador de Madariaga published in 1942 that describes the daily life of the ancient Aztecs.
He is a restless person and not only mentally. He always liked to travel and had the opportunity to travel throughout Argentina and much of the world. He reviews with a smile his trip to Kenya and Tanzania, in Africa. “I am a third generation Belgranian,” proclaims this native of Buenos Aires. And it was precisely at a bilingual school in her neighborhood, the Belgrano Girls School, that she studied African ethnic groups. As an adult, she was able to meet in person those she had seen in books: the members of the Maasai community.
Raquel Terragno, a curious mind and Claringrilla player
He doesn’t travel anymore. She suffered two hip fractures and moves around with a walker: “I still move with this. I have to leave the house, otherwise I’ll drown. I go to the plaza to read, and even if it’s eight blocks a day I walk. If I can’t go out because it’s raining, I exercise at home.”
Raquel seems unstoppable. The same will and patience that she invests to keep moving, she puts into play every time she faces the blank grid and the 19 definitions of it. It is an exercise that seems to go against the current of a routine, hyperconnected and fleeting life, with no time to slow down.
Although it is older adults who, for different reasons, are more committed to living at a different pace, specialists raise the flag of social interaction and the incorporation of new knowledge as tools to strengthen mental health, at any age.
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