Financial Times 17,580 by PETO

25 comments on “Financial Times 17,580 by PETO”

1. There were some enjoyable moments, but I had a heck of a long “Huh?” list, with many unable to parse. Where to begin?

   Not sure why a legend is an inscription or why a turn is a performer. Ground/advantage and round/considerable likewise. I was unable to parse PHENOMENA (got it all except the hen), BAD TROT (it’s a not very well used expression in Australia, perhaps; it was the Trotsky that I failed to get), STATUTE (I’m still totally confused), REPUDIATE (didn’t think of “repute” as “general opinion”), MAKE OUT (I tend to think more of “discern” as in vague outlines in a fog, rather than “understand”, but I guess so), HIT SINGLE (determined/single?) BLOOD SPORT (bloods/young men?). And I keep forgetting that for some reason TT is a race in the UK.

   Nearly all of these I guessed from intersecting clues, so it was all a bit hit and miss.

   Thanks Cineraria for your assistance.

2. GDU@1: TT stands for Tourist Trophy, a motorcycle race on the Isle of Man.

3. Thanks, Cineraria. I’ve been told this before but I never seem to remember.

   Won’t be long now before I’m told that all my reservations above are in Chambers, and no further correspondence will be entered into. 😉

4. Thanks for the blog, a few thoughts STATE= pomp or ceremony, usually used in the phrase “lying in state ” . TURN=performer is common in the UK , when we used to have music-hall or variety shows each performer would be called a turn, ” and our next turn is …” .
   REPUTE in this sense equates to reputation so general opinion, ” he was a person of high repute .. ” .
   A BLOOD is a swaggering dandy so typically a young man.

5. I thought this was very good with many neat clues, I did not know the phrase BAD TROT but it sounds very plausible for a bad run of luck and the wordplay was very fair.
   A frown for HIT SINGLE , Get Back should have a capital since it is the definition. I do not like the idea of fake capitals , but that is common, I would not like to see the opposite process become widespread.

6. Last point, the inscription around the outside of coins is called a LEGEND .

7. BROACH was an excellent clue and I also liked HEARING, SYRIA and ENTOURAGE which is one of those words crying out for the substitution treatment and this one delivered a nice surface. HIT SINGLE was LOI – I can genuinely report that the decapitalisation misled me so a definite thumbs down. Slightly raised eyebrows at ‘when’ as link word in DEPLETE and ‘eventually’ as final letter indicator in PRETEND: I was firmly informed by a tester that ‘eventually’ is associated with the last thing to happen rather than the last thing in a string/list.

   Thanks Peto and Cineraria

8. BAD TROT – Green’s Dictionary of Slang – https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/wqzopya – has
   ‘trot n.2 [SE trot, the horse’s gait] … 5. (Aus.) a sequence of consecutive events, a run of good or bad luck; thus phrs. good/bad/lean/tough trot.’
   with a dozen citations between 1895 and 2003 – nine Aus, two NZ, one flagged (literally, with a Union Jack) as UK but that’s:
   ‘1992 – [UK] – K. Lette – Llama Parlour – “My poor old mum had such a bad trot.”‘
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Lette – ‘Australian-British author … left Australia for the United Kingdom in 1988 and took full British citizenship in 2011.’

9. …It appears to come from ‘the national game of two-up’ – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up – only legal on Anzac Day or ‘at the new casino in Hobart in 1973’

10. De-capitalisation is rightly frowned upon, as it is not just misleading but inaccurate. Sadly, there are plenty of instances of “liberal” = L, “conservative” = C, “independent” = I etc, which are unjustifiable, as the abbreviations in question are for the political meanings Liberal, Conservative, Independent. Accuracy is of paramount importance in good clue construction.

11. A little similar to GDU, I had a few “huh?s” and could not parse several clues. I did not know the meanings of STATE, UTE, TURN, SINGLE, or ROUND as used. And I have only heard BLOODS used as “young bloods”, meaning it took a while to work out “young men”. Oh, and I got TT, but I thought it meant time trial.

    So, I solved quite a few clues relying on the crossers. A few too many unknowns for comfort, but it is good to learn.

    Favourite was SYRIA.

    Thanks Peto and thanks Cineraria for the excellent blog of some tricky clues.

12. I was quite happy to enter “BAD TROT” at 17D once I had the cross letters, but I still do not understand why “bad” = “regretful”. I was very “bad” recently when I robbed a bank, but I don’t “regret” it as I am now a millionaire!

13. 17dn; Collins 2023 gives us bad adj 10 regretful, sorry, or upset (esp. in the phrase feel bad about).
    James@12: the sort of argument made in your final sentence can never convince. Just consider that “best” and “worst” mean exact opposites as adjectives or adverbs, but are synonyms as verbs.

14. 7dn (HIT SINGLE): Collins 2023 gives us single adj 11 determined; single-minded: a single devotion to duty.

    22dn (ROUND): Collins gives us round adj 7 (of a sum of money) considerable; ample.
    Also ground n 8 position or advantage, as in a subject or competition (esp in the phrases gain ground, lose ground, etc)

15. I do enjoy a good game of “Guess What Word I’m Thinking Of”.

16. A lot of educated guesses and wait for Cineraria’s explanations, but amazingly all my guesses turned out to be correct.

    GDU and Cineraria at 1 and 2, while Tourist Trophy may be a well known race in the UK, I think (like Martyn @ 11) that most of us from elsewhere would be more familiar with Time Trials, common to races around the world.

    Thanks Peto for the parsing challenge, and Cineraria for meeting that challenge.

17. I love the misleading capital letters (or lack thereof, and in either direction; I still get caught out by “More work…”!) as it’s another hue from the artist’s pallette, so another taste for the solver’s palate. The wider the paint chart, the more colourful can be the solve. I don’t recall solving a Peto before (only recently returning to doing the FT for first time this century – the lack of Arachne in the G while Rosa Klebb is beckoning, with the online solving a further draw) and I agree that there were quite a few seeming Quibbles, with a capital Q – they weren’t justified, of course, but it seems that confusing us with words whose meanings come late in a dictionary’s list may be part of this compiler’s schtick – well, I think I quite like it. Too soon to know for sure but, for now, it’s a big thumbs up – it’s different; not the selcouth of the Don, where we may learn new words, but delving into our own deep memories of how quotidian words can be used!

    Many thanks, Peto, and to Cineraria also…

18. Cellomaniac@16: As a simple statement of fact, all four of the latest edition dictionaries I own have TT as an abbreviation for “tourist trophy” and not “time trial”. You could perhaps argue “race” = “time trial” = T + T, but none of them has T for “trial”. Chambers 2016, Collins 2023, and SOED 2007 have T for “time”: ODE 2010 does not.

19. Horrible crossword.

    DNF as I had two mistakes and therefore missed another two.

    Bad Trot is completely unknown and means I couldn’t finish the bottom left-hand corner as I guessed at Bed Rest and therefore missed Hearing. Too many clues were unparsable, which meant making guesses like BedRest (A period of ill fortune?) was not unreasonable.

    It’s sickening to waste a couple of hours of one’s precious time, trying to solve the unsolvable. Some of the clues were too clever by half and impossible to solve other than with all the crossers or via the definition.

    Delighted, others found it more accessible, but not this solver.

    I know everybody loves to be polite here, but I thought this one was poor. Crossword setting o******.

20. Thanks Peto. I managed to solve all of this but I really didn’t understand some of the references such as state, LEG BREAK, and bloods. I don’t mind misleading capitals, say, when a place name like Barking is really an anagram indicator; I’m less fond of the reverse when something should be capitalised such as Get Back. I did like this crossword overall with A BIT, HEARING, and ENTOURAGE being favourites. Thanks Cineraria for the blob.

21. Further to 18, I should perhaps have added that the phrase time trial appears in all the dictionaries cited.

22. I have absolutely no problem with capitalisation. Indeed, I was under the impression that punctuation and capitalisation could be completely ignored and could be used by the setter for misdirection.

23. A good setter will adopt the principle “I mean what I say, but I don’t say what I mean”, so capitalisation is OK, because it does not have effect to change the meaning of a word, whereas decapitalisation is not. The setter should aim to misdirect while remaining scrupulously fair to the solver, and introducing blatant inaccuracies, such as, for example, writing proper names in lower case is not playing fair.

24. I sometimes have Moly’s (@19) experience with a crossword – some words I don’t know, some constructions I just can’t see, some mistakes that mess up other clues, etc. But then I read the blog and comments, and usually realize that the fault was mine, not the setter’s. On to the next one, I then say, with the benefit of learning from the blogger and other commenters.

    P.S. I have no idea what Moly meant by “o******”.

25. Half of this was great fun. The other half was very much not. And now less fun when I know what was meant. But thank you Cineraria.

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