Comments on: Financial Times 14,135 – Dante

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 01:56:06 +0000

Hi Bamberger,
I had the same as you (when I wrote the blog).
Then found out that ‘obtain’ can mean ‘be valid, applicable or true’ – for which the Chambers Thesaurus gives us ‘exist’ as an alternative.
But don’t ask me to give a sentence in which both are interchangeable – I’m just a B#$%*& foreigner anyway.

By: Bamberger

Bamberger — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:58:31 +0000

I couldn’t get 6d, 23a & 25a.
I still don’t get 6d . I can’t think of a sentence where existent can be swapped for obtaining. I’d be grateful for an example.

By: Radler

Radler — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:17:07 +0000

For 8d
Angered, enraged and upset
…might have been quite nice, and you could have taken your pick as to the indicator and fodder.
It’s unusual for an anagram clue to be ambiguous. It’s much easier with cryptic defs and double definitions, (and with reversals if the indicator’s not positioned carefully).

By: John Newman

John Newman — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:07:56 +0000

Many thanks for this, Sil. Some people have criticised Dante at times for being too easy. This one should satisfy them because it was pretty hard. I couldn’t get anywhere in the bottom right hand corner. Probably because I put the more common English word RUBBER in 28 across instead of ERASER. Also I couldn’t get 3D perhaps for the reason you were unhappy with it and I had never heard of BLOATERS as a fish. I wonder whether it is fair to mislead us with more than one possible answer to a clue or whether that is all part of the fun? Cincinnus on Saturday had a clue which had two answers depending on whether you interpret “HIT” as being in the present tense of past tense. This held me up for quite a while.

With 29A, I don’t think it is a double definition. In fact I thought this a clever cryptic clue. I took the definition to be “out-of-this-world”. And space men is a reference to the fact that advertising agents sell space. i.e. in newspapers or on billboards.