That best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love - William Wordsworth (1798)

About Ted Clarke
“Language, especially my native tongue English, whether written, spoken, or just in one’s thoughts, is so chock-a-block with enigmas, idiosyncrasies and sheer complexity, that it provides an endless source of interest, amusement and stimulation, to lubricate the wheels of an active mind.” - Ted Clarke

Ted was born in Leicester, Middle England, way back -- in the last century! He is, professionally, a chartered mechanical engineer, though for most of his career he was employed in structural engineering. Starting his working life as a draughtsman at a steelworks and iron foundry, his love of flying led him into the aircraft industry. As a design engineer, he went from the drawing board,
where he worked on aircraft from the 36 ft wingspan Auster to the Bristol Brabazon having a tailplane of more than twice that span, to head the company’s stress and strength testing section. 
Sub-contract design work during this period included Ted being engaged on a highly-secret military tank’s up-gunning.
Invited to help set up a new research and development establishment, Ted then spent the major portion of his working employment in senior positions within two large nationalized industries. The second of these offered him a post, with a country-wide remit, to commercially promote advice on, and sales of, some of the mining developments that he had invented in the first of these employments. 

Independence
Complete dissatisfaction with this latter post resulted in Ted saying ‘goodbye’ to working for others; he set up as a consultant structural engineer to the private sector in mining engineering. The chaos caused by the miners’ strike and ‘three -day-week’ decided him to go on a business management course, following which, with Margaret’s valuable assistance, they went into their own retail business partnership.

Language
Taking the ‘O’ Level Exam in German, to check his competence in teaching himself the language -- to enable full contact with German engineers with whom he was in regular contact -- Ted was offered a position as a technical translator by a German mining company. However, it would have meant leaving Margaret to look after their first business alone, so the offer was declined. 

Calendars
This was when he created the range of Cornish Compact Calendars, with a single-sheet annual calendar as on "The Shop" postcard above, another covering a century -- including a slide-card profits’ calculator, and a 25-Centuries’ single-page calendar for genealogists. But these demanded too much capital to get properly launched and too much time away from his logological pursuits. The name COMCAL is derived from COMmercialCALculations and COMpact CALendars.

Sadness & Joy
Educated in the multi-disciplined University of Life, Ted has experienced diverse emotions -- great sadness at the loss of his father Charles at the age of 38, his first wife Beryl at 42 and their son Andrew at 34 -- but real joy to discover -- at the last count -- that he has four wonderful grandchildren by his daughter Susan, one of whom has extended the lineage. And, as you can see below, he is most fortunate to have been able to spend the last 27 years wedded to the lovely Margaret.

Puzzles
Ted’s interest in puzzles covers lexical, logical, cryptic and numerical genres, his fascination with words and language commencing as soon as he was able to read, maybe when he came across the old chestnut “When is a door not a door?” His father Charles, aka Wag, was undoubtedly the source of Ted’s inquisitive, waggish nature;
Ted recalls late night walks with his dad, and their Airedale bitch Tina, even remembering the time, under the clear panoply of stars in a stark black sky, when dad said, “ What do you reckon, young Ted, is at the end of all that lot?” Ted stared with wonderment into the firmament, then uttered, “Don’t know, Dad, what is it?” His dad couldn’t tell him either, but answered, “What if I could tell you there was a big brick wall at the end? What would you think, then? You’d want to know what’s on the other side of the wall, wouldn’t you?” It is probably this sort of enigma which conjured up in Ted’s young mind a wonderment of things natural, rather than any need to produce contrived puzzles. 

Boredom and Challenge
Tales of an island inhabited by people, some who tell the truth, others being habitual liars, seem to abound; they are generally variations of a tale from the distant past, wrapped up in new clothing by aspiring fledgling puzzlers. It is said “… and there is no new thing under the sun.” Ted’s view is that there is much out there that has yet to be savoured; even our little world still has its charms. While he undoubtedly feels that knowledge of wordplay, as practised in the past, is of historic value, forming an important part of a child’s learning processes, he is also of the mind that too many pages of today’s journals are simply cram-full of most uninteresting lists of abstruse words and ‘done-to-death’ variants. It is only when a longstanding puzzle solution has almost reached the limit of its sought-after acceptability, that Ted has accepted the challenge of writing a computer program to tackle its intractability. This is why he took on the tensquare, immediately. 

Ted's Tensquare Efforts
The aim, he was informed, was to create a tensquare using words found in standard dictionaries; the best efforts by others so far have required recourse to proper names, foreign words and very archaic ones. Son of ‘Wag’ that he is, Ted was able to publish a number of ‘chetongueek’* tensquares in his quarterly WordsWorth magazine, culminating with the full description of how he accomplished the effort, in the January 1997 issue. This article concluded with:-
‘The one sure thing I will claim about this tensquare is that every single word used in it may be found in a reputable standard English language dictionary. I know of no other able to make such a claim to date.’ Ted feels that he would have been made aware by now if someone had produced a more-acceptable one. 
*meaning tongue-in-cheek -- another example of Ted's wordplay.

Ted's Pangram
Another long standing aim, that of producing a reasonably well understood English sentence using each of the 26 letters of the alphabet once only, has also been tackled by Ted. This didn’t require the computer to create one -- a set of Lexicon® cards was sufficient -- though the WordsWorth Compendium did help by providing a list of all possible valid words lurking in its database. The Guinness Book of Records used to catalogue pangrams, or Shortest homoalphabetic sentences as it listed them, from about 1971. They discontinued this Language section item in 1991 with the entry, ‘Mr. Jock, T.V. quiz PhD, bags few lynx.’ as ‘the ultimate of 26-letter brevity.’ Ted’s 1994 effort below, was dismissed as merely ‘a unique achievement.’ 

Cryptic Crosswords
Ted believes that the most enduring wordplay will turn out to be the cryptic crossword. This has grown in popularity, certainly in the UK if not throughout the English-speaking world as a whole. This is undoubtedly because there is a virtual infinity of ways to define its clues and a vast multitude of subject matter. The same set of answers could arise from a vast variety of clues. 

The WordsWorth Database
The need of a massive number of words and phrases was paramount when Ted undertook the creation of the WordsWorth database. 
Then having made such a large list readily available for the solving of crosswords, Ted saw the further needs of several variants of this listing to allow its use for other facets of wordplay. This led not only to searches for words containing missing letters but also for words required to solve other puzzles. Such words as anagrams - 
( ear-ringed / grenadier ), the transpositions of a string of letters; isomorphic coding - ( bamboo / excess ), the alphabet-pattern of words; alphwords - ( alloquy ), words with letters in alphabetical order. A ‘WordBuster’ Conditional Database has been created, and is under further development, which enables like alphwords being brought together to display all anagrams in a group of consecutive entries.
As stated in Ted's quote above, “ … English ( language ) … … provides an endless source of interest …” per se, without any need to twist it about in an unnatural way. Ted feels the same way about numerical puzzles; those based on naturally arising circumstances in our everyday lives are much preferred by him to those concocted into unnatural forms, or to those that have been done to death. As E. Blacker puts it, “One man’s fun, for another’s none.” Though the youth of today needs must travel over ground that has already been well-trodden upon.

The WordsWorthWhile Website was first displayed 31st May 1997 and to date has had more than 4640 visitors.
 

Further Uses for the WordsWorth Compendium
Owing to its database being comprised of sequential ASCII text files, which can be read by standard word processors, text editors and desk-top publishing programs, the Compendium offers far more individual search possibilities than the five main options in its opening Menu. The ‘WordBuster’ Conditional Database, mentioned two paragraphs earlier, currently has six fields of variants, the first of which contains a single complete alphabetical listing of ALL the words in WordsWorth’s 442 files, i.e. in the 17 folders each containing their appropriate 26 ( A to Z ) files covering words from 2 to 18 letter words, plus a few longer words. The ‘WordBuster’ ConDat can be searched, filters applied to a number of fields simultaneously; provided, of course that the filter is valid, e.g. it couldn’t be expected to find an alphword containing the letters *T*E*D* in that order. It will find, however, the 1,500 8-letter words from that filter pattern.
Users capable of writing simple programs, in say MicroSoft’s Visual Basic, or Spectra’s PowerBASIC in which the WordsWorth Compendium was written, can very quickly create the source code to undertake virtually any search they may require.