Financial Times 17,643 by MONK

22 comments on “Financial Times 17,643 by MONK”

1. MOROSITY is marked as obsolete in Chambers.

2. Liked ALUMNA, ISSUER, A MINORI, ACADEMIC and ONE-STEP

   SYNROC
   SYNROC possibly making ‘son cry’….a case of reverse anagram?

   Thanks Monk and Oriel!

3. I took “morosity” as ‘showing gloom’, rather than just ‘gloom’. Wondered about the ‘no longer’ but then, as KVa also points out, a check in Chambers shows it to be obsolete.

4. Thanks Monk and Oriel

   15ac: I have a grumble here, in that DAY BEDS would fit almost as well, apart from the nina. I hope that this is an oversight on Monk’s part. I would not be happy with the suggestion that an ambiguity could be resolved either by a nina or by the absence of a dialect indicator.

5. Well, Pelham, I take your point re PAYBEDS but the nina was rather persuasive and since I’m not a habitual solver of Monk’s puzzles (without cheating), I was grateful for it. That said, today’s puzzle was progress indeed as I completed it unaided by online checks or the nina and the obscurities (which for me included EXTRADOS and GLEI) were fair.
   Satisfying and entertaining.
   Thanks to Monk and Oriel.

6. OMG. Although I scanned the blog, it was mainly to help me with the clues that defeated me today – of which, sadly, there were quite a few. I did not notice that DAY BEDS is, indeed, PAY BEDS and agree with PB that it is ambiguously clued. True, the nina would have sorted it out – but then I didn’t spot that either so, all in all, a poor PM showing today.

   Thanks Monk and Oriel

7. 15ac: Thanks Diane and PM for your responses to my comment.
   17ac: “from smallest to largest” is a fair paraphrase, but the literal meaning is “from smaller (to larger)”, given correctly in Chambers, as one would expect.
   20ac: I think the definition needs to be all of “J A Wight is one” and “desperate guy” is sufficient for DAN. Alf Wight was the Yorkshire vet who practised under his own name but wrote as James Herriot.

8. Pelham@7
   20ac-DALESMAN
   Agree with your parsing.

9. Cute nina, though nearly 10 unheard of words seemed like more than a few.
   Thanks to Pelham Barton for explaining who J A Wight was, and I agree on PAY BEDS about undesirable reliance on hidden messages, but it’s almost impossible to spot alternative solutions so I expect it’s just accidental.
   When asked to find a synonym and take part of it, it falls a bit flat if the useful remainder is the least interesting bit of the word, eg being asked to find LUT from klutz

10. Thanks Monk for the challenge. I enjoyed unfolding the nina and that helped with a few solutions. On the downside the nina may have forced some strange words (to me at least) into the grid like SYNROC, EXTRADOS, MONIST, MOROSITY, DALESMAN, A MINORI, and GLEI. As a result I ended up revealing more than I care to admit. Favourites included AS A RULE, WINE CELLAR, and ONE-STEP. Thanks Oriel for the blog.

11. [PostMark @6: OMG! Confused kitty! (3) ]

12. Similar to James@9, there were so many new words that this took me for ever to finish. Clued fairly, perhaps, but I found little joy in their sheer quantity. And of course I did not spot the Nina which was arguably the cause of the obscure words (unknowable, even).

    I was starting to enjoy Monk. But I am afraid I just do not have the time needed on a week day to regularly complete puzzles such as this, and I will have to avoid him in future.

    Thanks Monk and Oriel

13. Another day, another Nina to try to ignore while solving; ending up with just 5d left – _A_H_N – Couldn’t get it; read the Nina – NA_H_N, so “chap” = NATHAN.
    Parsed it as N[e]ATH (=”finished”, as in dead and buried, six foot under) + AN[t] (=”worker, almost”)
    But of course there’s ‘…;finished, adroit;…’ under N[e]AT in Chambers.

14. Had heard of a priori and a fortiori, but not A MINORI – Found it difficult to parse this – not the clue, but the Latin.
    The preposition A (AB before a vowel), meaning “from” should take the ABlative case, MINORE.
    MINORI appears to be the Dative (as do priori and fortiori).

15. Frankie@14: There is a vague memory in the back of my mind that some third declension ablative forms in Latin end in I not E, but I do not have an authoritative source which I can quote. For the moment, let us note that SOED 2007 gives the origin of a priori as “Latin a priori from what is before”. Until we hear from someone who has a respectable Latin grammar to quote from, I am prepared to give the SOED the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have got their Latin right.

16. Thanks Monk and Oriel.

    Terrific!

    Saw nina towards the end, helped with several in NE.
    There were many answers that I was not aware of that I got simply following the instructions – great clueing.

17. Late … and necessarily fleeting … drop-in.

    Thanks to Oriel for the excellent blog, and to all for comments. Just one thing to clear up: Chambers explicitly has ‘da’ as dialectal for ‘father, dad’, so the absence of such an indicator to my mind fairly flags ‘pa’, and hence there is no ambiguity. In my book, the answer DAY BEDS could have resulted from, e.g., the following tweak to the published fair clue: Options for patient local old man close to Derby County (3,4)

18. The burden for indicating non-standard usages is on the setter, and is frequently ignored in the wild and woolly world of daily crosswords. Solvers don’t have to give it any thought, and certainly can’t be expected to know which setters pay attention to that sort of thing, or which dictionary they use. A MINORI is indicated as Latin in Chambers but not in the clue, and N for neutral isn’t in Chambers at all. Da in Collins isn’t given as dialect. To suggest that solvers should make a deduction from the absence of an optional indicator in one particular dictionary is unrealistic, to say the least. It’s a perfectly sound clue for both pay beds and day beds. I put day beds because I have heard of day beds, and not heard until today of pay beds. I changed it to pay beds when I spotted the message. So it was ambiguous for me, once I realised there were two possible answers. Until then, there was no ambiguity – the answer was clearly and certainly day beds.

19. James @ 18 N = neutral is ubiquitous in plug wiring diagrams.

20. 7 or 8 NHOs in this puzzle, proving that my GK just isn’t G enough. Learning new words is fine, but too many jorums spoil the alphabet soup. If they dominate the puzzle, they make the solving experience less fun for one who likes wordplay and definition leading to “aha” moments. (With a jorum the “aha” moment, if any, comes when you find the word in the dictionary, rather than when you solve the clue.) This is my failing, not Monk’s. I enjoyed learning some of them, and the rest of the puzzle was challenging and fun, so thanks, Monk and Oriel for that.

21. To answer some outstanding queries.

    James@18:
    [1] I don’t quite see how the assertion “Solvers don’t have to give it [the use of non-standard wordplay-component indicators] any thought” makes this answer ambiguous. Moreover, the word “Options” in the definition to my mind flags PAY BEDS rather than DAY BEDS, as surely it’s the NHS, not patients, who decides whether cases require the latter. Supporting this interpretation, neither my (very experienced) testers nor the editor flagged the answer as being ambiguous.
    [2] It is usual to flag an essential feature of a wordplay component (DA = local father, UND = and in Berlin …) but not always necessarily of an answer (A MINORI), unless the answer is obsolete (MOROSITY = gloom no longer), which seems reasonable.
    [3] Some abbreviations are common-sense fair game whether or not confirmed in the main dics which, indeed, have perverse omissions (S, M and L for small, medium, large being noteworthy). N =neutral (cf Simon S@19) is on countless electrical plugs and automatic-gear-lever housings around the globe; the latter usage being in the ODE gave me licence to use it.

    KVa@2:
    “SYNROC possibly making ‘son cry’….a case of reverse anagram?”
    An interesting point. Up until a couple of years ago this “D gives WP” format raised my eyebrows but, in recent years, an increasing number of (very experienced) setters seem to have used it, and a number of (very experienced) test-solvers have increasingly confirmed its acceptance. From what I’ve gathered through correspondence with them, this device is OK as long as there’s some notion that the “gives” masks a simple, one-step device such as an anagram or a charade. I hope that helps.

22. Monk @21
    [2] Is it? If true, it’s news to me, but I don’t think it is true. Where there are such rules, they apply equally to wordplay and solutions.
    [3] I know N is neutral and have no issue with its use – my point was that you are not consistent in using Chambers
    as authority (as indeed nobody expects you to be), so you shouldn’t rely on it as sole authority for your point, which is in any event inappropriately technical for a daily puzzle. Does the FT have a standard dictionary? Who knows, or cares? The Independent prefers Collins, for whom da is not a dialect word. One might draw the absurd conclusion that if the clue had been in the Independent it would be ambiguous, but because it’s in the FT it’s not.
    [1] Your point about options doesn’t help you: ‘options for patients’ could just as naturally refer to choices that doctors make for patients. Doctor discussing case with colleague: ‘The options for Mr Smith are a day bed or the geriatric ward’
    What makes the clue ambiguous is that there is an obvious answer that matches the clue in every respect, and in exactly the same way as your intended answer. Whether your intended answer is a better answer does not remove the ambiguity. The fact that your testers didn’t flag it doesn’t add anything; you can’t say I didn’t see a black swan because you only saw white ones.
    I don’t really understand why you’re defending the clue as if it’s suggested you’ve made a mistake, when there’s
    just been an unforeseen coincidence. What’s the big deal?

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