Financial Times 17,917 by GOLIATH

23 comments on “Financial Times 17,917 by GOLIATH”

1. 22a: The Hague is hardly a port! Doesn’t need one being right next to Rotterdam. Scheveningen (which might be part of Greater Hague but is quite distinct) does have a fishing harbour though.
   Otherwise great – thanks Goliath and Oriel!

2. Faves: SHEILA, MILK and SYCOPHANCY.
   Thanks Goliath and Oriel.

3. Someone better than me will be able to comment on whether the parts of speech involved in “being ok sailing” is equal to navigability, or viability=life is OK. I can sort of understand the latter.
   I enjoyed this from Goliath.

4. I correctly guessed NAVIGABILITY (for which “being OK sailing” does feel a bit awkward) but failed to parse it or to spot viability=life. But enjoyed the rest, though it took a while to remember AVOGADRO.

5. Thanks Goliath and Oriel

   Super puzzle

   Tim @ 3 I think this is an example of Goliath’s use of playful / stretchy definitions.

   If a waterway is navigable then you could say it is “OK sailing” (ie a nounal phrase), so its navigability would be an indicator of how navigable it is.

   As far as “viability” is concerned, one of the Chambers definitions of viable is “Capable of living” so viability is a measure of that capability.

   As I aid stretchy but fun, and a lot more cumbersome to explain than to think!

6. As Oriel says this was great fun – much ingenuity without too much difficulty. I failed on AVOGADRO but I would attribute that that to my ignorance rather than Goliath’s obscurantism. I particularly liked SYCOPHANCY.

7. Super puzzle, as Simon S said.

   I always like to see BRAHMS AND LISZT (and again I’ll say how I appreciate seeing them, like 26/27, side by side in the grid). I liked the anagrams at 21ac and 26/27 and particularly enjoyed working out AVOGADRO, DOPPELGANGER, PABLO PICASSO and IGNORING from the wordplay.

   Great fun, indeed – many thanks to Goliath and Oriel.

8. Thanks Simon S @5… I think I understand now. 🙂

   Eileen @7, you’ve just reminded me what a pleasure it was to have BRAHMS AND LISZT as an answer in a crossword puzzle rather than as an anagram indicator. 🙂

9. I do consider myself to have a pretty broad vocabulary and general knowledge but 10A (Avogadro), 21A (Lymphocyte) and 20D (Amnion) were all unknown to me.

   Re 18A, I had always thought that a “doppelganger” was a person who looked liked another. I did not equate this with a “spirit”.

10. Claudia@9: I agree on “doppelganger”, as a “look-alike”; but the German is something like “double-walker”, and so a sort of “ghost of oneself”.

11. I really enjoyed this and liked the positioning of the double entries.

    Avogadro is famous for the Avogadro constant, the number of ions, atoms, molecules in a mole, so pretty basic chemistry. It’s used to calculate practically everything. Lymphocytes are white blood cells.

    Thank you to Goliath and Oriel.

12. It is funny how we see things differently. I enjoyed this puzzle, but I am afraid I did not see the great fun or neat surfaces others mentioned.

    My favourites were AVERSION, SLAP UP (for once I saw the reverse clue), and PICASSO. I would have added PORT but, like William@1, I suspect The Hague is not actually a port.

    A few quibbles. BASE RATE and interest are not synonymous – another “stretchy” definition, I guess. 1ac is missing a cockney indicator. This is not normal English. A few obscure words, but well within what I would view as an acceptable number.

    And a question: what is the derivation of “penny for the guy” and how is it used (if indeed it is still used outside crossword land)?

    Thanks Goliath and Oriel

13. Thanks Goliath. For some reason I did not enjoy this crossword from Goliath as much as others by him but I can’t find anything ‘wrong’ with it either. I revealed SYCOPHANCY and PORT and ticked DOPPELGANGER, TROPHY, and PABLO PICASSO as favourites. Thanks Oriel for the blog.

14. Bonfire Night 5th November is the night to burn guys (still done in Lewes) to remember the attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament. When it was the big autumn festival, the local children would make a guy and hawk it around asking for a penny for the guy to raise money for the fireworks (in theory). It’s not been a big thing over here for 30 odd years, but it was common when I was a child and started working.

15. Thanks Goliath and Oriel. Further to some earlier comments, I like the way that 1/4ac and 26/27ac reduce the effect of the isolated NW and SE corners of the grid. Goliath often does this sort of thing.

    1/4ac: Brahms and Liszt is given as slang in Chambers 2016 p 184 and British informal in ODE 2010 p 207. Both these dictionaries give the origin as “rhyming slang”, but neither says “Cockney”. It should be noted that by no means all rhyming slang is Cockney in origin, nor is it all abbreviated.

    18ac: Chambers p 460 gives doppelganger (with or without an umlaut on the a) as “a ghostly double of a human person, an apparition; a wraith”. Collins 2023 p 592 gives it as “legend> a ghostly duplicate of a living person”.

    26/27ac: I was surprised to find that penny for the guy is not in the current edition of Brewer, but it is in SOED 2007 p 2149, which gives it as “used by children to ask for money towards celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night”. The relevant definition of guy is “An effigy of a man, usu. a crude one in ragged clothes, which is burnt on a bonfire on or near 5 November, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot.” Shanne@14 confirms my memory of the phrase being used in real life.

16. Shanne – I remember – even went round asking penny for the guy.
    Replaced by Halloween now (although that was around before the Puritans tried a bit of cultural cleansing).
    The continent has All Souls Day

17. Thanks Shanne and PB for the guy explanations. I did think it related to Guy Fawkes, but the “stretchy” definition in the clue of “a donation” made me wonder whether it had a broader meaning. No longer much in use anyway by the sound of things.

    And not all rhyming slang is cockney, you say? I did not realise that.

18. Collecting Pennies for the Guy was a thing in my childhood, but has now been eclipsed by Halloween trick-or-treating. We used to say “penny for the guy” to anyone wearing particularly shabby clothes. The one feature that has survived is the stylised Guy Fawkes mask, made famous by the Anonymous protesters.

19. Claudia@9
    There’s a movie, “The Man Who Haunted Himself”, I seem to recall, where Roger Moore sort of dies, but becomes both his “good self”, and his evil doppelganger.

    I think Mr. Moore quoted the film as his best performance as an actor, at an “audience with” event I went to, many years ago. I was dying to ask him, “did you get two fees?”, but shyness defeated me.

20. Very enjoyable.

    I knew all the obscurities, even remembering Avogadro from A level chemistry long long time ago. My only puzzle is why Goliath means Milky.? I’m sure it’s obvious, but not to me.

21. Moly@20
    Goliath is not milky. People like me are people of M(Y) ILK dropping the Y(unknown)

22. This was one of the rare occasions where having a degree in chemistry came in handy; I thought Avogadro was probably a bit recherché for mere normals though.
    After getting stuck for a bit on PRIMNESS, I once again ask the FT to make their app show the setter’s name without asking (and generally just copy the Guardian’s web app).

23. Bobtato @ 22 (should you see this)

    AVOGADRO crops up across the Guardian / Indy / FT daily cryptics about once a year.

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