Financial Times 14,532 by ALBERICH

16 comments on “Financial Times 14,532 by ALBERICH”

1. Nice puzzle this, Thanks Alberich and PeeDee ..

   A small edit on 2d – include P for power as part of the anagram fodder

2. I found this very difficult and didn’t manage to finish.

   A small edit for 24A explanation
   The first church dignitary is DEAN rather than ARCH DEAN. The ARCH comes from support, as explained

3. Actually for 24A, the answer lends itself to this plausible parsing as well – DEACON (church dignitary) maintaining ARCH (firm support) at first. The original parsing proposed by AID in the 2nd comment is likely the right one.

4. Thanks all, fixed now.

5. Staring blankly at this – just looked at this blog – saw solution to 4ac – management = disposal? Really?
   I hope it improves as I continue to attempt the rest of the clues…

6. Thanks for the blog, PeeDee, and especially for DISPOSAL, which was the one I didn’t get.

   It didn’t leap out at me as a definition for management, either, but, as soon as I read the blog and saw it was that, it made perfect sense. Chambers gives management as the first meaning of DISPOSAL, in fact.

   Lynette, if you’re still reading this, instead of getting on with the puzzle, please, please persevere – you’ll be glad you did. It’s bursting with clever clues, leading to lots of smiles and ‘ahas’. I won’t give any spoilers but, among many others, I thought the little 27dn, right at the end, was an absolute gem – an absolutely perfect surface. I very much liked 30ac, too, but I’ll stop now.

   Many thanks to Alberich for another cracker.

7. Hi Lynette, I wondered about management=disposal too, but the definition is in Chambers so fair enough.

8. For 9dn did anyone else put JOLLY – (trip, almost) cheerful – as a first attempt?

9. Thanks Alberich, lovely cluing. 🙂

   Thanks PeeDee; I got a bit stuck in the NE corner but eventually cracked it.

   I think SHREWISH was my favourite, although there were plenty of other excellent ones.

10. I solved this yesterday evening, but the system was not accepting my comment for some reason (no problem as long as this goes up now).

    Generally a very enjoyable puzzle with just two grumbles, so thanks Alberich for a great deal of enjoyment and PeeDee for the blog.

    A very small grumble on 4ac. I am not completely happy with “relaxed” = “laid back” = “the word LAID reversed”, as it seems to me like a clue to a clue. However, I have to accept that this construction is a simpler analogue of the time-honoured use of “aboard” to mean “placed between two Ss”.

    A more serious grumble on 18dn. To me this was an obscure word, and not the sort where an anagram gives enough help. In my view, any of the 24 possible permutations of the four unchecked letters gives a plausible word.

11. Hi Pelham, surely there can’t be a grumble with the clue just because you don’t know the solution! All words will be obscure to someone and obvious to someone else. If compilers stuck to a set of words where they could be sure that everyone knows all of them then we would have child-like crosswords. Or have I missed the point?

12. PeeDee@11: No I am not saying that obscure words should not be used, but I think it is a reasonable expectation that the clue for an obscure word should give the solver a good chance of constructing the answer from the wordplay and checked letters. Here what we have is .A.A.E.O and the fact that the other four letters are J, L, N, and P in some order. As I said in my earlier comment, any of the 24 permutations of these letters seems plausible to me.

    Compare with 2dn, which might also be considered an obscure word, although I happen to know it from the text of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Here the anagram does help, together with some reasonable knowledge of prefixes and suffixes. The checked letters give E.T.R.A.E, with I, P, T, and X to go in. The definition “root out” makes it reasonable that the X is the first of the unchecked letters, the next can only be I, and -ATE is a much more common suffix than -APE, so in my view that word could be constructed with confidence from the clue and checked letters.

13. True, but what I’m saying is that jalapeno is not an obscure word, you just happen to be one of the people who doesn’t know it. Conversely there will be other words that seem glaringly obvious to you that other people don’t know. It just depends on ones particular life experiences.

    There is a solver out there who has never watched TV, another who has never eaten a curry, one never had a chemistry lesson, one who doesn’t know any Latin, another has never seen a football match, one never heard classical music, another never heard pop music, one never eaten Tex-Mex… each of us falls into some area of ignorance.

    The same crossword is for everybody. If setters have some sort of obligation that anagrams are only OK for words that absolutely everyone will know then they have to be very very obvious indeed, or there will be someone out there who doesn’t know one at least one of the anagram words in the puzzle. In this case it just happened to be you.

14. OK if jalapeno is not to be regarded as an obscure word, then my comment becomes that I was unable to solve the clue because I did not know the word and the anagram was insufficient help. I stand by the following general observation in blocked crosswords where checked and unchecked letters alternate: Anagrams are of limited use in the special case of an answer in which consonants and vowels alternate throughout the word.

15. I’m so late in posting that I doubt anyone will read this. Nevertheless…

    In 25d, I parsed “a branch of the fighting forces” as A + RM (Royal Marines). Which of course gives ARM (as PeeDee has). So perhaps two equally valid approaches to that one.

16. I am still reading keeper, though I doubt anyone else is!

    I wouldn’t like to say which of the two was intended, they seem equally good to me.

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