Financial Times 15,883 by AARDVARK

11 comments on “Financial Times 15,883 by AARDVARK”

1. Enjoyable for the most part. Last two in were 5d and 8a. Until I got 5d, I could only think of ‘not guilty’ fitting in 8a. 5d was, IMO, a poor clue with OUT both in the answer and the defining word of the clue. Thanks to Aardvark and PeeDee.

2. I agree that SIT OUT wasn’t the greatest clue, but otherwise I enjoyed this. NUT CUTLET was good but my favourites were the “almost &lit” pair of THATCH and TIARA. Two new TIT birds today – the WREN TIT here and ‘marsh tit’ at St. Elsewhere’s.

   Good to have a pangram as well.

   Thanks to Aardvark and PeeDee

3. Thanks, PeeDee and Aardvark.

   I enjoyed this [albeit with the same reservations about 5dn].

   My favourites today were INSOMNIAC, for the surface and  HYPERBOLE – I love the word, anyway – because I just followed the directions and there it was.

   PeeDee, I don’t see your objection to ‘tour’ as a containment indicator in 3dn: if you tour a stately home, for instance, you go round it. In fact, Chambers gives ‘a round’ as the first definition of the noun ‘tour’.

4. Thanks Aardvark and PeeDee

   Enjoyable puzzle and for once I did pick up the pangram before coming here – with the Z in my first answer in and the J soon after, the ears had pricked quite early.

   With 22a, I had wondered whether the ‘number’ had more to do with a lullaby to get someone off to sleep.  The online Oxford dictionary has as a definition for tour – to visit; go around – if we accept that, then the use of it in 3d makes sense.

   Hadn’t heard of NUT CUTLET or ROUTE STEP and liked the clue for ONE-TWO.

   Finished with that ROUTE STEP and then SIT OUT (which took a little while to parse) as the last one in.

5. Thanks Aardvark, PeeDee

   Very enjoyable.  ONE-TWO was very good, though does it need the say?  Also NUT CUTLET, WREN TIT, THROB and INSOMNIAC.  I left SIT OUT out, as it seemed pretty unsatisfactory.

6. Thanks both. I think “dish” is superfluous in 1a. That held me up. Otherwise enjoyable except for the 5’s neither of which I got anywhere near.

7. Thanks to Aardvark and PeeDee. I did not parse INCOME TAX and did not know ROUTE STEP (I kept trying to squeeze in rifle step – there is a rifles march) but finally saw SIT OUT (though all the “outs”  put me off the scent) and ended with those two.

8. Eileen & Bruce – my thinking is thus:

   If I sold you a tour of a stately home and then didn’t let you go inside, you had to “go around” outside the house, would you be happy? I bet you would want your money back.

   If I say I toured Austria on my holidays you might ask “where in Austria did you go?”.  I reply that I didn’t actually go to Austria I went to Germany, Switzerland and Italy.  Does that make sense?

   If you tour somewhere you go around inside the place.  To me it is not OK to substitute go around outside on the grounds it means the same thing.

9. Hi PeeDee – I’m really sorry to nitpick butI’ve met ‘tour’ as an anagram indicator [tour = go [a]round] for such a very long time that I admit I’ve never given it a second thought. Using your own example, if you told me you’d spent your holiday travelling [a]round Austria, it wouldn’t occur to me that you meant visiting the adjoining countries but not Austria itself. I can walk round my garden without going outside it. Just a different way of looking at things, I suppose – we’ll have to agree to differ, I think. Certainly it’s a long-established and often-used indicator and I can’t remember ever seeing it questioned before.

10. Hmmm … I wonder if the issue is not ‘go around’.  It can have two meanings – to literally ‘circle around the perimeter of something’ or ‘to go in or to many places throughout (a community or locality)’  (online Oxford).

    The first is the instructional sense used by Aardvark and the second is how Eileen describes it with the garden.  Can one make a case for tour to equal the first sense ? Worst case is that tour = go around (second sense) which leads to the go around = first sense instruction to put TRY around UL.  I’m still comfortable with the device.

11. Eileen – the point is that in 3dn for tour to be a containment indicator it has to indicate that TRY goes outside UL.  . In your touring the garden example you are going inside the garden, in this case TRY would have to be somehow inside the boundaries of UL.

    brucew – you are absolutely correct, the sleight of hand here involves using two meanings of “going round”.  First convince someone that tour means “go round” in the sense of go inside somewhere.  Then point out that “go round” also means to bypass, to go outside.  Hence “tour” also means to “go outside”.  This last step is mistaken, meaning is not transitive.

    To make this fallacy more obvious take another example: Iris indicates paving stone.  How do I justify this?  One meaning of Iris is that it is a flag (a flower).  Another meaning of flag is that a flag is a paving stone.  Voila!  Iris indicates paving stone.  No it doesn’t! Chaining meaning of words together doesn’t work.

    I think Eileen has it right that tour has been used as a containment indicator for so long that no one gives it any thought. I don’t have any issues with this in the sense of “it shouldn’t be in the crossword”, I just find it interesting.  I am told crosswords have a grammar, but most grammars are full of exceptions and it does not surprise me that crossword grammars have exceptions too.  It is a fallacy but nevertheless accepted by tradition.

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