Financial Times 16,305 by MONK

21 comments on “Financial Times 16,305 by MONK”

1. My first guess for 18d was DEMOCRAT. Dismissed it since “tarced” is not a word. As crossers made it clear I have to put this down as a bad error with “traced” being the intention.

   For a nina, all I spotted were DIRTY HARRY in the SW  and a similarly place HELLO DOLLY in the NE.

    

   Thanks all.

2. .. and ALBERT HALL in the SE, and SQUARE ROOT in the NW.

3. Sheesh! How did I miss them? Thanks Andrew.

4. I had not noticed the problem with TRACED, thanks for pointing that out.

5. This was tough even by Monk’s standards but fair.After struggling through Imogen I needed something to help with this-just one use of the check button, sadly absent here.I came a cropper entering TUTELAGE without    parsing leading to wrong answers in  16 and 21.

   Lovely puzzle and blog. Thank you!

6. Many thanks to PeeDee for the usual excellent blo, and to others for comments and, on this occasion, patience …

   Oh dear! :O … profuse apologies for the glitch at 18dn. I’ve emailed the editor-cum-checker to see if the clue can be amended online to Politician followed minimally amended restraining order when upset, and now I’m off to the kitchen fridge to get a wee slice of the ever-fresh humble pie therein.

7. Tough but fair indeed – and I noticed the Nina  – quite wordy clues, I thought – shame about the Democrat error

   Thanks to Monk and PeeDee

8. Thanks crypticsue, but I’m not quite sure why the clues were ‘wordy’.  Typical averages for puzzles are around 7 wpc: yesterday’s FT was 7.3, thi puzzle is 6., and I once managed to drop it to 4.96, but it was a challenge: http://www.fifteensquared.net/2018/09/12/financial-times-15961-by-monk/

9. I definitely typed “this puzzle is 6.7” above … no idea what happened?

    

10. Monk@8 and 9 – I think it may be because when I printed it off today, the print was larger than usual and that might have made me think that’s a lot of words

    All good words as usual 😉

11. Thanks Monk and PeeDee

    As far as I’m aware, ‘other ranks’ refers to members of armed forces who aren’t officers, so NCOs would fall into that category.

    Just checked, and Chambers gives ‘Members of the armed services not holding commissions’.

12. Simon – this bit that puzzled me is that NCO stands for non-commissioned officer. Other ranks are indeed non-commissioned, but they do not need to be officers.  Other ranks are not examples of NCOs.

    In contrast, if the solution had been “NCOs” and the definition was “other ranks” then this would work as NCOs are examples of “other ranks”.

13. PeeDee

    Yes, I agree it’s confusing. Chambers again: the definition of ‘non-commissioned’ is “Not having a commission, as an officer in the army below the rank of commissioned officer or warrant officer”.

    So over to wikipedia: “A noncommissioned officer (NCO) is a military officer who has not earned a commission.[1][2][3] Non-commissioned officers usually obtain their position of authority by promotion through the enlisted ranks.[4] In contrast, commissioned officers usually enter direct from a military academy, and are often expected to have a university degree.”

    It starts to make sense now.

14. Thanks for that Simon, but I’m still confused!  Are privates included in “other ranks”?

    If “other ranks” only includes non-commissioned officers then the definition works just fine.  Possibly privates do not have a “rank”, they are just “men” (apologies to all the women soldiers).

    On the other hand if privates are included in “other ranks” then that means “other ranks” are not NCOs, as the majority of them are not non-commissioned officers.

15. PeeDee

    Yes, OR includes NCOs and privates, as none of them have earned commissions. Effectively, it’s a binary division between ‘officers’ and ‘other ranks’.

    It’s a bit reminiscent of the old cricketing distinction between Gentlemen and Players, a class-based differentiation to keep hoi polloi in their place, as they’re “not one of us”.

16. Thanks to PeeDee and Monk

    Excellent as always from Monk (slight wobble at 18d but I didn’t notice it while solving), and perhaps 23a needed a DBE indicator.

    I can’t see 1a as a quadruple def though. Possibly a triple with “order fairly” as “square”

17. Hi Dansar – my reasoning for a quadruple definition was from Chambers under Square:

    noun 17. Order

    adverb 5. fairly

    adjective 13. (boringly) traditional

    intransitive verb 1. to suit

    I particularly liked the way that each definition comes form a different section of the entry

18. Thank you PeeDee

    Neither my Collins nor my Chambers list an adverbial sense for “square”. I may have to cough for the full versions if no-one obliges this Xmas.

19. Just surfaced from a bad dose of the lurgi, so apologies for late posting. Tough puzzle with many clever tricks, but one factual error – there is no Y in Mendeleev (I still have my chemistry A-level textbooks – how sad is that?)

20. Jaydee@19 : Wikipedia confirms Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (often romanized as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef). Of course, Romanization of (not only) Cyrillic script affords some leeway. BTW I did not choose this entry explicitly, but it is inbuilt into crossword dictionaries.

21. Thanks Monk and PeeDee

    Found this difficult, spread across a number of sessions over a couple of days while on hols.

    Missed parsing RECESS (couldn’t track down PRECESS) and DEMOCRAT (after not being able to get the reversal working).  Missed the nina too !

    Was pleased to remember the Mongolian capital (old spelling) quite early on.  Liked the use of misdirection of some of the definitions of solutions and the word play bits – especially the R-R (the best), LEANDER (hero worshipper) and MENDELEYEV (table designer).

    Finished up the top with PATROLS (another clever definition in ‘goes over beat’), RECESS (with the tough wordplay) and HELLO (took longer than it needed to see where the books were to be ignored from).

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