Puzzling

If you live in Australia, you may have noticed a bit of a media flurry in the last week about the message MURDOCH IS EVIL running backwards through a word search puzzle for kids. It appeared in the Sunday Telegraph  — a Murdoch-owned paper! Oh my! Image source: Gawker.com This caused rather a storm on Twitter  and online. So — this is the big question : is this one of those accidentally created messages, like the faux pas we saw with the Woolies word search a few months ago ? The short answer: NO. The long answer: This hidden message was put there intentionally by the setter (and personally, I'd give them a medal). Yes, it's possible for words to be accidentally created in any grid of random letters — but these are almost exclusively 3, 4, and 5 letter words (and the 5 letter words are rare, at that). This is why swear words — those infamously 'four letter words' – can easily be accidentally created in a word search grid. For a short phrase like MURDO...