Financial Times 17,153 by BRADMAN

22 comments on “Financial Times 17,153 by BRADMAN”

1. Thanks for the blog, I think your CENTAUR idea is fine. For GEORGE the SEE is just so the rest flows, without it we would need plunges or plunged. Thanks for LEAT and AVENS both new to me.
   I thought this was good and the obscure bits were clued very fairly. 1AC a very neat anagram and I liked TIPPER.

2. Quite a few challenges in this one, as evidenced by the number of jottings around the borders of my printout page.

   I’m used to THERAPEUTIC without the -AL. Those last two letters seem a bit superfluous, but apparently they mean the same. Why, in 2d, is ATE a troublemaker? Not comfortable with ENTAILED and REQUIRED as synonyms. In 5d, surely a tipper is someone who’s generous, not ungenerous? I didn’t care much for the “definition” for CENTAUR. I get the wordplay for 8d but what’s the definition? Couldn’t work out the wordplay for AVENS till I came here.

   I’ve learnt today that a leat is a trench and that there’s a wine called tent, and I hadn’t heard of Punic, nor latakia, nor clock golf.

3. Thanks Turbolegs: some new words for me were “avens”, “leat”, “clock golf” and the reference to “Saul of Tarsus”.

   Like you, I have no idea why the word “see” is in 8A but I agree with Roz that, without it, the clue would not scan.

   Re 17A – I don’t agree that wainscoting should necessarily be “good-quality oak”.

   Could someone explain to this Aussie why “ate” means “troublemaker”? Not even an Internet search could shed any light.

4. Yes, I agree this was a fair crossword and satisfying to do. I knew that 3d and 25a were going to be nho for me and there was no way to work them out from the wordplay so I gave up and came here. So thanks for the blog, Turbolegs, and for the puzzle, Bradman.

5. Ate = goddess of mischief

6. Greek

7. Geoff, it seems that we are in harmony re “leat”, “golf clock” and “ate”.

   Re 5D, I was originally stumped as I thought that someone who tipped would be generous, but the I re-read the clue and concluded that a 2p tip is not generous at all. Thank goodness that tipping in Australia is a rarity.

   Never heard of the Punic Wars?

   Re 8D “George” is an RAF slang for “autopilot”.

8. Thanks Sourdough, I used to consider myself a sort of (amateur) expert on Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses. I now consider myself chastened!

9. Thank you, Peter. It didn’t occur to me that the “2p” in 5d was doing double duty. And thanks Sourdough.

10. My sticking points were the same as those already mentioned, namely, LATAKIA and AVENS. I didn’t know ATE but guessed it was a deity. LEAPT and PUNIC were happy guesses too, thanks to the wordplay. As for WAINSCOT – a clue I liked – it refers to a fine quality of oak which is typically used in wood panelling because it is easy to carve but that doesn’t mean that all wainscoting is necessarily made of oak, fine or otherwise.
    Thanks to Bradman (tough but fair) and to Loonapick for much needed explanations.

11. I decided to take a break half way through the expected struggle with Enigmatist and thought this would be a nice confidence builder. No such luck, with yet another Pasquale disguised as Bradman. No hope with LATAKIA or AVENS, which I didn’t even bother to guess, although I see now that the latter, plus LEAT, was a “forgotten” rather than an “unknown”. I hadn’t heard of CLOCK GOLF or ‘Saul of Tarsus'(‘) profession though. I agree about the query for ‘See’ in the clue for GEORGE.

    My favourite was the clever and concise ‘Fellow Arab?’

    Thanks to Bradman and Turbolegs

12. Thanks Bradman, Turbolegs
    Lots to like, particularly the clue for CENTAUR which I thought very cute.
    But quite a few grumbles:
    LATAKIA is just plain unfair
    for AVENS (another fail) we are given ‘surprise’ for heavens; when you are surprised, you might say heavens but you don’t say surprise. You say surprise when you are surprising someone else, and then you’d look pretty odd if you said heavens.
    for GEORGE, it’s all very well to say the rest of the clue won’t scan without the see, but all of the clue except for the rest of it doesn’t scan with it. It’s just a fudge, imo.
    I was solving this by staring at the blank grid on the FT website, not filling anything in, so I didn’t get CLOCK GOLF, having thought it was crazy golf and then failing to check it against crossing answers. I don’t know what clock golf is, and I don’t understand how the clue points to it any more than it does to crazy golf.

13. Thanks Bradman for challenging my brain. I had some of the same problems as others; I needed a word fit to solve AVENS, GEORGE, LATAKIA, and CLOCK GOLF, all of which were new to me. I dislike double defitions like LATAKIA because I had no chance to derive even a guess due to the lack of wordplay. However, there was much to like including SEA OTTER, PTARMIGAN, and especially POUNCE since the surface was so apt. In fact, I found excellent surfaces throughout this crossword. Thanks Turbolegs for the blog. I can’t remember the last time you assigned a DD of 10.

14. This was indeed tough but I did not find most of the contentious words too hard. Saul of Tarsus’ occupation was learnt in my prep school as were the Punic wars. I also played clock golf at about the same time as I learnt the above . But I always hope to learn some new words and the goddess ATE and TENT as a wine were two new ones. LATAKIA was remembered from my brief pipe smoking phase and some geums or AVENS are wilting in my garden, My point is that most of these word should be known by an experienced crossword solver who should also be happy to learn something new and dare I say not grumble?

15. SM, if you knew the ones that seem to have been unknown by many, lucky you. My grumbles aren’t about the difficult words in the puzzle, they are about the clues for those difficult words. I like learning new words, but the point of a crossword is that it is supposed to be a fun way to test your wits. A clue like ‘tobacco and port’ offers no test of wits, it just illuminates one’s ignorance. It’s not even a double definition, as the tobacco is named after the port, or vice versa as it may be. I have now educated myself about clock golf, though I note from wikipedia that its heyday seems to have been in the 1920’s.

16. Hard

    I got there other than Avens but needed my son’s help with Therapeutical as I didn’t think there was such a word, and nor does my Chambers.

    Needed to look up Latakia and I agree with the comments above this was a hard puzzle and with a few rather poor clues (eg misleading “see” in George – I must’ve spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what the answer had to do with a bishopric).

    Avens was another poor one in my opinion. Surprise does not mean Heavens.

    But there were some marvellous clues here as well, so a bit of a curate’s egg.

    Thanks

17. I tend to agree with James on this. Surprised the goddess Ate was new to you, SM. For example, look back at the comments for the recent Dogberry tribute crossword.

18. Ps. At my village primary school in the Welsh valleys, we did not learn about the Punic wars or Saul of Taurus’ occupation, nor do did we play clock golf. So I was at a bit of a disadvantage in trying to solve this crossword as these clues and others (eg Latakia) gave me little / no help in finding the answers

    Incidentally, I did learn about the struggles of miners and their families and remember some children whose clothes were threadbare.

    I wonder who had the richer education?

19. Well, we didn’t find this too difficult, but maybe that’s because of the amount of abstruse GK one of us has collected in over 60 years of crossword solving and the knack the other of us has for spotting a word that will fit and finding it will parse. Mind you, we did have to check the spelling of LATAKIA and remind ourselves in Brewer of who ATE was.
    Favourites were CATFIGHT (reminding us of the famous duet attributed to Rossini), PTARMIGAN and ELIMINATE.
    Thanks, Bradman and Turbolegs.

20. This certainly needed an overnight brain reset. Thanks for the workout Bradman.
    I took “see” in 6d to be perceive. You perceived there was a pilot present, even if there was little evidence, or something. As Peter@7 wrote, GEORGE is slang for autopilot.
    The rest – a good struggle. Thanks for the blog Turbolegs and well done.

21. Apologies if someone’s already pointed this out to you Turbolegs, but there’s a slight error in what you say about 1A. The anagram fodder there does not include “run”, which is acting as the indicator.

22. Thanks Rudolf@21. An inadvertent error on my part that has now been fixed.

    TL

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