Financial Times 17,949 by MONK

26 comments on “Financial Times 17,949 by MONK”

1. Lots of head scratching. Never heard of trews (23a), nor tit/fool, dig/grub, ice/reserve nor dal/pulse (or is this an alternative spelling for dhal?). What on earth is des res? And needless to say, I was not familiar with that English town.

   But I enjoyed it more than Kite’s in the Guardian. Thanks Monk & Oriel.

2. Ah! Google found des res for me. 🙂

3. For a Monk puzzle, not too difficult but with a few less common words and tricky parsing to stop us getting complacent. I don’t know if saying I liked the surface of 12a is the right thing to say, but I found it amusing anyway. Favourites were the ST ANDREWS def and the surface and the ‘Doctor’s problem’ def for 24d.

   BTW, Monk has given us a little present; might not seem like a big deal but I’m sure it would have been very difficult for him to come up with the words to make it work.

   Thanks to Monk and Oriel

4. WP@3: Is there something extra? I am not seeing it.

5. Hello Cineraria, have a look at the across clues. As I said, maybe not all that exciting for the solver, but that’s easy for me to say – I’m not the setter!

6. Cineraria @4. Look at first and last letters. WordPlodder beat me.

7. Blimey! I seemed to rattle through this, although I would never have got 4A, a bit too clever for me that one, and 8 down stumped me too.

   I enjoyed St Andrews, Prang, Side Issue, Sheerness and plenty others.

   As ever, it was anagrams that got me going but this was a nice level of complexity.

8. Thanks Monk and Oriel

   23ac: I think this works even better if you think of St Andrews as the town, which contains more than one golf course: I forget exactly how many. My only visit there was for a conference in 1981 and I became a teetotaller during that conference.

   24dn: ODE 2010 p 482 gives dhal noun variant spelling of DAL¹. Chambers 2016 also has it that way, but Collins 2023 has it the other way round.

9. I enjoyed that. Got most of the top half quite quickly but slowed down in the bottom half. Some very neat clues but never heard of SHAVE meaning plunder.

   Thanks Monk and Oriel

   (GDU @ 1 I gave up on Kite – was very glad to come to this one.)

10. I did this after the Kite and found it more tractable. Very enjoyable with some nice twists.

    Thank you to Monk and Oriel

11. SHEERNESS resisted the longest. I’d never heard of the place, and it just sounds so improbable. Is there another town nearby called Opacity? Just kidding, of course. Anyway, this was tricky, yet with nothing left at the end that I couldn’t explain.

    The phrase “lost tribe” suggests to me “…of Israel,” so I spent some fruitless time wondering about Dan, Asher, Gad and the like.

12. Similar to GDU@1 & Fiona@9, several “synonyms” caused lots of head scratching, and I finished with a couple of clues unparsed.

    I most liked ON THE TROT, SO TO SPEAK, ENLARGE, groaned (nice groan) at ST ANDREWS, STERN was a cheeky clue that made me smile, and EYESORE. Heroic fighting was a well-hidden anagram and it was interesting that he turned IBSEN from a hidden clue to a double subtraction.

    And I am sorry, but I still cannot see the present mentioned by WP@3 and Hovis@6. I am sure it is obvious, but would someone explain in more detail please?

    Thanks Monk and Oriel

13. Not the clues, the answers.

14. OK finally saw it – in each across answer the first and last letter is the same.

    (but so what?)

15. Thanks Monk for an excellent crossword once again. I found this a bit easier than Monk’s usual fare but I still couldn’t parse EXTRAVERT and DALEK. My top picks were SOPHOCLES, GROUNDING, ERASE (great surface for a crossword staple), IBSEN (liked ‘repeatedly uncovered’), CHEERIO, and STERN. Thanks WordPlodder @3 for pointing out the ‘little present’; that makes this crossword all the more ingenious. Thanks Oriel for the blog.

16. Oh it is the first and last letters of each answer! I was comparing the first and last letters of each answer then first and last of each clue, and completely missed it. Thanks Fiona, Peter T et al

17. And for those of you who were mystified by my last post, let me start again. I was actually looking at the first and last letter of each clue, then of each line in the grid Thanks to Fiona and others, I finally saw what was going on.

    Apologies for taking up so much space. I should proofread better

18. Fortunately ICENI came to mind because we had a discussion recently about Boudica. Great puzzle.

19. Fiona @14: In answer to your question ‘and so what?’: Sometimes setters like to challenge themselves and will have a theme, Nina, or pangram in their crosswords. Monk has taken this to a new level by having all the across answers begin and end with the same letter without filling the grid with odd words. I, for one, admire his ability. This elevated my already high opinion of this crossword exponentially.

20. We found this remarkably easy for a Monk puzzle, all solved and parsed without recourse to any help. We didn’t spot the first and last letters device, but wonder if the selection of words for this made things relatively easy.
    THanks, Monk and Oriel.

21. Hard poop and hairy arse, oh dear! A fairly gentle Monk.

22. TS @ 19

    fair enough – apologies to Monk

23. Just great, even without the trinket. Thanks both

24. I did this before I looked at Kite.
    No regrets
    Rock on Monk!

25. Is Shakespeare a FORMER dramatist?

26. Pianola@25: ODE 2010 p 687 gives “of or occurring in the past: the seafarers of former times” for former¹. A case could be made for excluding Shakespeare from his, but it certainly applies to Sophocles, as used in 4ac.

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