Okay, so today I was fiddling around with this crossword puzzle, and it had this clue, “cheer on.” I’m thinking, “Alright, this should be a breeze.” But man, was I stumped for a bit. I started plugging in words that I thought fit, you know, like “hooray” or “yippee,” but nope, none of them were working. The puzzle was staring back at me, all smug.
I tried a bunch of different angles. I even started looking at synonyms for cheering, thinking maybe there’s some fancy word I didn’t know. I went through “applaud,” “support,” “encourage,” even “root” because, hey, you never know. Still, nothing was clicking. The boxes remained stubbornly empty, and I was starting to feel like I was losing a battle of wits with a piece of paper.
Then, it hit me. Maybe it’s not about the act of cheering itself but something related to it. I started thinking about what happens when you cheer someone on. What are you trying to do? You’re trying to boost their spirits, right? To push them forward. So I thought, “What’s another way to say that?”
I scribbled down some more words, getting a bit desperate now. “Boost”? “Push”? “Incite”? And then, like a lightbulb going off in my head, I thought of “urge.” Could it be? I counted the letters. Four letters. It fits! With a grin, I filled in the boxes.
- U
- R
- G
- E
YES!
It felt like I’d just cracked some secret code. Who knew a simple crossword clue could take you on such a wild ride? But that’s the fun of it, right? The little victories. So yeah, “cheer on” in this case was “urge.” I jotted it down in my notebook, a reminder that sometimes the answer is right there, hiding in plain sight. You just gotta nudge your brain a little—or a lot—to find it.
