Financial Times 13,336 / Cinephile

9 comments on “Financial Times 13,336 / Cinephile”

1. Thanks Gaufrid: nice blog.

   I thought that FINGAL was very clever: however, PISTON, I think is extremely obscure and verging on the unfair.

   Were these your “pauses for thought”?

2. Hi JamesM
   Yes, PISTON was one, mainly to confirm that I remembered correctly the French I learnt at school 45+ years ago. The other was 13ac where I needed to check that VIS = force.

3. I think 11 across should be supersede.

   Supercede has become so commonly used in error it may be accepted
   by some—-but the Latin root means to lie above hence “sede”

4. Hi Arthur
   You are indeed correct (Latin never was my forte and I think I have only ever seen the word spelt with a ‘c’).

   Chambers and Collins only have ‘…sede’ but COED gives both forms with the comment: “The standard spelling is supersede rather than supercede. The c spelling is recorded as early as the 16th century; although still often regarded as incorrect, it is now being entered without comment in some modern dictionaries”.

   It will be interesting to see which version is given when the answer is published tomorrow.

5. Thanks for the blog Gaufrid.

   My pause for thought today was the correct spelling in 11ac. The OED gives SUPERCEDE as a variant spelling of SUPERSEDE, but most other dictionaries don’t give it a mention.
   Either way, the homophone still works!

6. Sorry, I was too slow!

7. I have just returned from a Latin reading group [!] to find the above correspondence.

   There is no need for Gaufrid to apologise for Latin not being his forte. Indeed, a knowledge of Latin could well lead one into that ‘error’.

   It is perfectly logical to think that, as ‘precede’ comes from the Latin ‘praecedere’, to go before, so ‘supercede’ must come from the Latin ‘supercedere’ to go above – except that oddly, since we have precede, concede, secede and proceed, all from the root verb ‘cedere – to go’, there is actually no Classical Latin verb ‘supercedere’!

   My SOED gives, under ‘supersede’: ‘in early use often -cede’, ‘Old French ‘supercéder, later superséder’ and ‘Mediaeval Latin often -cedere’. I’m very tempted to think of the ‘s’ spelling as an early error and the ‘supersedere – to sit above’ definition being adopted as justification! 🙂

   Having said all that, I have no doubt that the solution tomorrow will have SUPERSEDE.

8. ’supersedere – to sit above’ definition

   For ‘definition’ please read ‘derivation’.

9. SUPERSEDE is among a list of “ten most commonly misspelt words” that I used to carry around as a schoolboy. The others included accommodation, paraffin, manoeuvre, inoculation, diarrhea, misspelling, excitement, etc

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