Financial Times 14,930 by LOROSO

18 comments on “Financial Times 14,930 by LOROSO”

1. Thank you David and Linda. I share your views on some of the clues seeming to be contrived to fit the rubric (I’m still grumpy!), but agree on the neatness of others. I particularly liked 11 & 28ac, 3 & 20d.

   8d was my LOI. The use of SA for “it” is an old chestnut, used as an abbreviation of “sex appeal”. I can’t find it in Chambers.

2. Thanks, June. And thank you for the SA in 8 down – I think we had lost patience by then. And if I was being really picky I’d say that the clue results in SHSALINE.

3. Thanks David and Linda
   I’m sorry but I have to disagree with your quibbles, 6dn and 8dn are fair and accurate.

   6dn FT (unclued) HE’D (he had) in (to be included) an anagram (shot) of IN MY AREA SO

   8dn SA (it) plus L (left) in SHINE (beam)

4. Hi Gaufrid
   June explained the SA, thanks.
   I don’t think your comment answers our reservations about 6 down. We can see “HE’D” is a contraction of “He had” – but why not simply use “he’d” in the clue? To us it appears contrived, and unnecessarily confusing.

5. Hmm. I launched into it with gusto and enjoyed the first few solves. But by the end, the whole indeterminism of “will it have an ft or not” started to mildly annoy me. Found the cluing very accurate – but some of the word pairs seemed odd, 1ac and 8dn specifically.
   Thanks to Loroso and D&L for further enlightenment.

6. A warm welcome back to Loroso!
   [his last dated back to Dec 2013, if I’m right]

   I liked this crossword very much, precise and generally concise clueing.
   Yes, knowing that many solutions have FT in them may perhaps annoy some for the reason peterj gives @5, for me it was helpful in finding solutions that otherwise might have been harder to get.

   I cannot agree with ‘a curate’s egg’ but everyone experiences a crossword his or her way – so fair enough.
   In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with HE’D.
   The important thing is here that it is not part of the anagram but an insertion (as Gaufrid @3 makes clear).

   Usually I find smutty clues a bit tedious.
   But 18ac (CRAFTED) is so very well constructed, in support of the surface, that it is a strong contender for my COD.
   I also liked 13ac (IDYLL) a lot, neat.

   David & Linda, many thanks for the blog.
   A pity that this crossword didn’t cheer you up.

7. Thanks, Sil

   As you say, different people see things differently. We couldn’t help feeling that the setter was trying too hard to impress, and the end result was somehow lame and contrived. And, without wishing to be contrary, I don’t share you view that the clues were precise. By way of example, British English would describe what’s referred to at one across as a tail lift, and liftgate is usually spelled as one word, not two. Most people think of Swift (at least of Jonathan Swift) as an essayist, rather than a novelist. Perhaps Loroso was thinking of Graham Swift. Hie for urge is tenuous, too – most people would think of hie as hasten. I cannot recall having seen the term used otherwise. But perhaps I’m being Mr Logic from Viz with a capital V.
   Still, walking the dogs afterwards always has the desired effect.

8. Put me down as one who thought this was an absolute gem. Sorry D&L. Different strokes for different folks innit?

9. David @7.
   Loroso must indeed have thought of Graham Swift, not Jonathan this time.
   And for a couple of other quibbles Chambers comes to the rescue of the setter.
   That dictionary gives “lift gate” (two words!), definition: ” a device at the rear of a lorry”.
   It also tells us that “hie” as a transitive verb means “to urge (on)” (def #1).

10. Sil@9
    I wish I could explain more clearly. The setter shouldn’t need rescuing. Crosswords are about language, which is about communication. Whether a word is or isn’t in a particular dictionary is beside the point as far as I’m concerned. What matters to me is the language that people use. Yes, lift gate may be in the Chambers dictionary as two words, but the overwhelming majority of occurrences of the term are as one word (you’ll find nine million-odd on the Internet compared with six hundred thousand of the two-word version if you do a Google search).
    And the same goes for hie. As I said in my earlier comment, I cannot recall having seen the term used in the sense of urge in literature or anywhere else, but as hurry.
    It all ends up as appearing over-engineered and joyless. I suppose the nearest analogy I can think of is comparing a journeyman footballer to a natural star.

11. No-one’s compelled to like any puzzle, but I sympathise with Loroso having drawn a blogger who wasn’t tickled by this.

    For me it was the puzzle of the day, which is going some given that Jim Toal did both Graun and Indy and he’s generally as good as it gets (and today was no exception). Admittedly, I didn’t parse 6d: I’m pretty sure I’ve used RoTD as an entry myself sometime, so I know that it’s the only film which fits that enumeration and begins with R and ends in Y, and it looked as though it was a long anagram. Life is too short to go into detail with long anagrams unless I’m having real difficulty sorting out the answer from the definition and crossers and a rough idea of what other letters to use. I was quite busy enough admiring the craftsmanship of the other clues anyway.

    Unlike David, I’m unfamiliar with liftgate as a single word: tailgate is one word, but I’d naturally write “lift gate” myself. I didn’t go and look up hie – I hadn’t seen it used that way but it seemed plausible enough and it was blindingly apparent how precisely all the other clues had been put together so I was entirely happy to trust the setter and editor. (Had it been my clue, I suspect that I’d have gone for HI + E because I think HIE is a pretty silly word in the first place, but that’s no reason to complain about it.)

    As to Swift being novelist or essayist – I associate Jonathan with Gulliver, Tale of a Tub and the Modest Proposal, which is two novels and one essay, so I don’t care either way (and would probably have used “writer” anyway rather than risk the nitpick). Someone who’s a big J Swift fan could well feel entirely differently.

    But I’m not trying to criticise D&L. I’ve often been surprised to see blogs praising puzzles to the skies when I found them dull or annoying, and being surprised the other way is an obvious corollary. I can only hope that should they happen to blog one of mine, I won’t give them cause to get sniffy.

12. Chalmie @11
    You slightly misunderstand. I’m not familiar with liftgate either as a single word or as two words – the term I’m more familiar with is tail lift, which is what British English usage calls the vehicle component concerned. But if you check on the relative frequency of liftgate as one word or two, you’ll find that the vast majority of occurrences are of the one-word variant.
    Writer would have been much better than novelist. Or think money transfer – it completely avoids the issue, and would be innovative.
    Hie is fine in its place – Wordsworth’s Prelude comes to mind. “… as from hill to hill he hies, His staff protending like a hunter’s spear,” always used to raise a snigger at school, but is also rather good.
    I haven’t looked at today’s Independent crossword, but I found the Guardian crossword slightly more challenging, more fun and totally accurate.
    As they say, diff’rent strokes …

13. Now we are discussing Jonathan Swift again – as if that is what Loroso meant.
    How do we know it isn’t Graham?
    The solution was clear enough and what happens next in my approach of crosswords is: I fill in the answer and go on.
    I didn’t think for a minute Swift not being a novelist.
    Blame it on me.

    The same with 25ac.
    The solution was crystal clear, so HIE had to be ‘urge’.
    Perhaps, it’s because I am not British and that I don’t know certain words like – indeed, Chalmie – this curious one.
    I usually think ‘well, that must be right then’, checking it afterwards.

    And David, you say “I’m not familiar with liftgate either as a single word or as two words (….)”.
    So for that reason a setter shouldn’t clue that word?
    I was also not familiar with that word (also not with ‘tail lift’) but, again, I just entered it and thought ‘that’s it then’.

    You make a real statement above: “Crosswords are about language, which is about communication”.
    I am not sure where ‘wordplay’ fits in here.
    Maybe I am too vague now but for me “language” in crosswords is mainly some kind of Lego, a set of building stones.
    “Communication” comes in when we talk about surfaces.
    To me a really important thing but less important than playing with these Lego blocks.

    You say: “I found the Guardian crossword slightly more challenging, more fun and totally accurate”.
    The first two are a matter of taste.
    Yes, Vlad’s puzzle was more challenging (as was Tyrus’s), but I found this Loroso puzzle more playful.
    As to accuracy, I really don’t see why this puzzle by Loroso (aka Anax) lacked the ultimate accuracy.
    Unless for you and me accuracy has a different meaning.

    But having said all this, I am happy to accept that we’re all different (aren’t we?).

14. Many thanks for the blog D&L and to all for your comments.

    A quick word on the “he’d” / “he had” thing. Since the two are identical in meaning there’s no unwarranted sneakiness going on. As a clue develops, so too does its story, and in my mind I had the image of some chap desperate to find himself on film. For that purpose “he had” gives more of a sense of urgency.

15. Sil@13
    The discussion returned to Jonathan because Chalmie (as I did) reasonably assumed that the Swift referred to in the clue was Jonathan. My allusion earlier to Graham Swift was tongue in cheek. Ask most native English speakers about famous writers with the name Swift and at least 999 out of 1000 will think of Jonathan, since Gulliver’s Travels is one of the classics of English prose. For all his undoubted merits, Graham Swift has yet to achieve literary immortality. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that a reference to Shakespeare is to Nicholas Shakespeare rather than to William.
    As for clueing unfamiliar words, when most people doing this crossword see the definition “item at back of lorry” they think of “tail lift”, which is the British English term for that item. If an unfamiliar American term is acceptable, would the German term (Ladebordwand or Hubladebühne) be acceptable too?
    I want crossword solutions to be soluble, namely terms that I, as a well-read person, might expect to have come across. I can only speak for myself, but I daresay most people would see it the same way.

16. David, I got your point.
    Even if I am not that sensitive when it comes to unusual words.
    After reading your last line @15, I just wonder what you think of Pasquale’s crosswords as he often uses three or four words that hardly anyone will encounter in an entire life.

    Meanwhile, our expectations of a good crossword are (partially) different.
    I think, as I said before, that this also has to do with the fact that English is not my first language.
    My vocabulary has tripled in the last eight years, but I am still more focused on breaking down a clue as quickly as possible while accepting solutions that feel as a possible word rather easily. A word that should sound English, of course – not Ladebordwand or the like.

    A pity that this crossword was not up your street.
    Next time better.

17. Coming to this several weeks late, but I enjoyed the puzzle – thanks Loroso and D&L. The film is “The Remains of the Day”, not “Remains of the Day”, so 6D is not strictly accurate.

18. Thanks Loroso and D&L

    This was published on the week when I was moving house and has sat around in the new house with others from this particular time undone until now. As it turns out it was a week of very hard puzzles with an Io that kept me busy for ages prior to this one and an unusually hard Neo before that !

    I twigged to what was going on quite early with GIFT HORSE as my third one in. Whilst not annoyed, as peter@5 was with the ruse, it did have one having to perform many double-takes as to whether an undefined FT would be included or not.

    Am pretty liberal with cryptic clues generally. As long as it leads one to fill in an unequivocally correct answer, then to my mind it has done it’s job. LIFT GATE (and my spellchecker automatically inserted in the space) was a new term for me, we refer to them as a TAIL GATE down here. It was actually my last entry to the puzzle after finally getting FILM EXTRA at 2d and had very high confidence that it was the correct answer.

    FOOTMUFF was another new term and made that little bit harder by being composed of words (such as FOOT, PLATES, MUFF and BLOW that were ‘secondary’ definitions of other words). Had also not seen CRUFTS or GLORIOUS TWELFTH either.

    The only tiny, tiny issue that I had with the puzzle is the same as Querulous@17 with the correct title of the book and film at 6d. – but again it didn’t stop it from being the unequivocally correct solution.

    Now to finish off the Redshank puzzle to finally put that week of FT puzzles to bed. A week up on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland will be the perfect setting to do that !! 🙂

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