Financial Times 17,967 by MONK

18 comments on “Financial Times 17,967 by MONK”

1. A few tricky solutions to tease out here and GULES, LOI, went in as a bit of a guess. Not a heraldic term that I can recall encountering before. Other tricky ones included RODSTER, TITUBATED (as 1 across!), YESHIVA, SKYWRITER and the definition of IN THE CLUB. Favourites included SWITCH OFF, STEERSMAN (COTD), RED WINE, MENDICANT and WELL BUILT. Everything was fairly clued, even the tricky ones though SKYWRITER seemed quite a tricky CD, as was the anagram for YESHIVA. Thank Goodness for the crossers.

   Thanks Monk and Oriel

2. Liked SWITCH OFF, STEERSMAN, IN THE CLUB and EDGER.
   Thanks Monk and Oriel.

3. A nice puzzle, on the gentler side for a Monk. I did not pay much attention to the near-anagrams, and I also do not see any further game afoot with them, now that you point them out. (But well done spotting them.) I wonder whether this started as a more ambitious setting exercise, since TASMAN SEA and STEERSMAN are only two letters different?

4. I wondered if A and D changing was to do with the “these times”, “now”, “was once” and etc time repetitions, but it’s not consistent enough. RODSTER I’ve come across in my reading of older books and YESHIVA from reading Kellerman, so found this less challenging than I can find Monk.

   Double Monk day, also appearing as Harpo in the Guardian today.

   Thank you to Oriel and Monk.

5. 25a IN THE CLUB: ‘Quick with child’ was a new one on me. Oed.com says it “may have arisen by the inversion of the phrase with quick child”. nho that neither.
   [The coloured grid had me thinking: now, where have I seen that before? Answer: On !rish TV. It’s a Saint Brigid’s cross, symbol of RTÉ from 1962.]

6. Thanks Monk and Oriel. The paired answers all have an A in the across answer changed to a D in the down answer.

7. Drat, FrankieG @5, I should have spotted the Brigid’s Cross, I’ve made them. In my defence, St Brigid’s Day is 1st February, so I wonder if this was bumped from Saturday?

8. PB@6: Yes, that’s it.

9. Thanks for the blog, very neat puzzle with a very helpful grid , all first letters and more than half crossing for each entry . This helped a lot with a few obscure definitions/answers and the wordplay was very clear.
   Linear C (and A) has not been deciphered yet , it is on my jobs list.
   Quick=pregnant is new to me, quick must have a varied history. We have ” the quick (living) and the dead ” . Quicken is a medical term for a stage in pregnancy when you can feel the baby , it feels like a butterfly .

10. Like Cineraria, I found this on the less hard end of the Monk spectrum. I spotted the one letter difference in four symmetrically placed pairs of words trick, but well done to FrankieG @5 for spotting the St. Brigid’s cross which is something I’ve learnt today. I was only able to get IN THE CLUB from the term “quickening”, the first movements of the baby noticed by a mother-to-be in about the fourth month of pregnancy. (Sorry Roz @9, you’ve beaten me to it).

    Thanks to Monk and Oriel

11. Today I learned that “roadster” is American. (The word has passed into disuse among pretty much everyone except antique car enthusiasts, so how was I to know.) IN THE CLUB went in for me based on the anagram only; I didn’t know that as a euphemism for pregnancy, so the definition made even less sense to me than to most of you.

12. IN THE CLUB very out of date , an even older version was IN THE PUDDING CLUB.
    More modern is “up the duff” but that was my preferred version 30 years ago so must be out of date now.

13. Thanks Monk for a WELL-BUILT crossword. I did use the check button to verify the ‘odd words’ I derived from the wordplay but generally I found this on the easier end on the Monk spectrum. I particularly liked TWANG, TODAY, SKYWRITER, and ACTED. I didn’t spot the very clever A/D (Across/Down) switch. Thanks Oriel for the blog.

14. We just about finished this unaided – having failed to find a word to fit the letters we had for 28ac we looked again at the anagram fodder for 15dn and realised there was a Y in it so SKYWRITER was then immediately obvious. We’d not encountered RODSTER before; it’s not in our dead-tree Chambers but it’s in the online OED (with a note that it dates from 1867 so that presumably explains ‘old angler’). We had to check TITUBATED in Chambers but we had heard of YESHIVA and GULES before. Our favourite, though, was the ‘Russian doll’ clue for TASMAN SEA.
    Thanks, Monk and Oriel.

15. 19dn: For what it is worth, rodster is in Chambers 2016 p 1349 marked as archaic, and in Collins 2023 p 1724 without any such indication. It does not appear to be in the Oxford Dictionary of English 2010 edition. It is in the Shorter Oxford 2007 p 2600 marked rare and dated from the late 19th century. When comparing those four dictionaries, of which I have the printed editions, I always feel that, if a word is only in the two volume SOED and not in any of the single volume dictionaries, it may be considered too obscure for a daily newspaper. I would say that the same principle applies even more strongly when using oed.com, unless the word is so recent in origin that it has not made it into the single volume dictionaries, all of which except Collins are now somewhat older than I would like.

16. Finished and generally enjoyed. Exactly the same last few and tricky ones as PostMark@1.

    Easier end of spectrum for Monk so thumbs up from me.

17. I found the D clues easier than the A ones, and even though I only got about half of the answers, still being a bit new to this Cryptic stuff, I enjoyed enough to make it worth having a go.

    Are there any good primers on how to read clues? I seem to recall someone, maybe Cinephile from back in the day, wrote a book on the subject.

18. [Autistic Trier @17: The Chambers Crossword Manual by Don Manley (Pasquale/Bradman) is an excellent resource on how to read and construct clues.]

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