Financial Times 17,978 by GOZO

32 comments on “Financial Times 17,978 by GOZO”

1. I forgot about the ‘drinks cabinet’ tag; full marks to Gozo for a clever grid and to Cineraria for highlighting the theme. The clue for ‘prostrate’ made me laugh.

2. Top fave: CARAVAGGIO.
   MESS TIN
   ‘appear’ works fine in the surface reading but does it work in the cryptic reading?
   OSCULAR
   I took the def as ‘kissing’

   Thanks Gozo and Cineraria.

3. KVa@2: MESS TIN: I think the cryptic reading could include a comma (unwritten in the surface clue): “Hash[,] can appear in Tommy’s!” Not a perfect solution, but I think plausible.
   “Oscular” muscles would be muscles used “for kissing.” But you could also say “kissing muscles,” so I think your take works, too.

4. An interesting puzzle with a mix of very easy and very challenging clues.

   I best liked SPORTSCAR and PROSTRATE with lovely surfaces

   I did not understand PAIR and did not realise a sight is unpleasant. Thanks for the explanations Cineraria. I thought SKIRL was ridiculously obscure.

   Thanks Gozo and Cineraria

5. Good fun to see what was in the ”Drinks cabinet’ once the grid was filled. Some hard ones along the way in BACKCOMBS (my last in), PROSTRATE (which I thought was going to be an anagram), CARAVAGGIO and the forgotten (John Mason) NEALE.

   This is probably what you mean @3 above Cineraria, but I parsed the cryptic reading of ‘Hash can appear in Tommy’s!’ as ‘Hash’ = a stew which can appear in a Tommy’s mess tin.

   Thanks to Gozo and Cineraria

6. Thanks for the blog and finding all the drinks, at least we did not get Medoc.
   I have only heard SKIRL in relation to bagpipes.
   MESS TIN , I agree with the blog and WordPlodder@5 , the whole clue as definition plus some wordplay at the front. Tommy Atkins was renowned for eating cornbeef HASH from his mess tin.

7. Martyn @4 a sight can be both . Something nice and worth seeing ( before a night out ) and something not so agreeable ( the morning after ) .

8. In addition I thought hash= MESS and can = TIN. Without those elements I struggle to make the answer fit the ‘clue as the definition’

   Edit: Ah, I see wordplodder@5 got there first! I probably did not refresh. Read this as “I agree with Wordplodder@5”

9. Another who’s only heard of the SKIRL of bagpipes, but it’s not uncommon in my world: there were bagpipes all over Glasgow last month, although not as many as when I was there for the bagpipe festival in August one year and always someone busking in Edinburgh.

   PROSTRATE was clever, but I found GUIDELINES a bit thin, ditto INCOG, but Gozo had obviously painted himself into a corner there.

   Thank you to Cineraria and Gozo.

10. I enjoyed rummaging through this ‘drinks cabinet’, to which we can possibly add the ‘Prost!’ of PROSTRATE for ‘Bottoms up!’
    I agreed with Cineraria’s interpretation of MESS TIN and that ‘sight’ could be pleasant or not depending on the context; ‘a sight for sore eyes’ v ‘he looked a sight after being caught in the rain’, for instance.
    I didn’t know ‘skirl’ but could, thankfully, parse it – was wondering if it related to a moaning wind or a Scandinavian-derived geographical term!
    Cheers (what else?) to Gozo and Cineraria.

11. A nice gentle theme. CASTILE is a nice surface; PROSTRATE has rightly been highlighted by others and SPORTSCAR is fun. COTD for me was the delightful LORGNETTE: lovely surface and very cunning anagram. BACK-COMB, I would certainly spell with a hyphen and I’m not sure about COMBS being warm undergarments – I have heard ‘combinations’ being abbreviated to ‘combis’ or, perhaps more properly, ‘combies’ but never ‘combs’. I found some of the link words – ‘to’ and ‘at’ – to be somewhat misleading today and was surprised to see right = R and left = L being used more than once. I suppose it’s only a convention to utilise abbreviations just the once in a puzzle.

    Thanks Gozo and Cineraria

12. Although I wouldn’t take it as part of the theme, CAPUCHIN is related to CAPPUCCINO via the brown colour of their robes.

13. How can “arranging” serve the intended purpose in 11A? “X arranging” does not mean “X [being] arranged”. “arranging X” would provide for the letters in X to be arranged, but “X arranging” does not, because the intransitive meanings of “arrange” are, according to Chambers, “to come to an agreement” and “to make plans”. For “arrange” to act as a valid anagram indicator, it needs to be used in the transtive sense of “to put in order”.

14. Thanks Gozo and Cineraria

    1ac: backcomb is given without the hyphen in Collins 2023 (p 146), ODE 2010 (p 117), and even in the Pocket Oxford 2013 (p 57).

    11ac: I think this can work grammatically as an inverse anagram, or whatever you care to call it. The letters of “Tax a novice” are found by arranging the letters of a word meaning “digs”.

    23dn: I have a grumble here. Is there any advantage in writing “First Surrey eleven” instead of “Surrey’s first eleven”? The latter is a familiar expression for the name of a cricket team, and would give us a grammatically correct indication for the single letter S.

15. 6ac: I got SKIRL straight away from the lyrics (by Michael Flanders) of the Flanders and Swann song “in the bath”. The relevant couplet reads

    To the skirl of pipes vibrating in the boiler room below,
    I sing a pot pourri of all the songs I used to know,

16. PB@14 on 11A. That would be an indirect anagram. A definite no no these days. In any event, I doubt the setter had anything of the sort in mind.

17. [ When Charon ferries you across the River Acheron , you hand him your Obol and he says – Welcome to Hades , here are your bagpipes . ]

18. As usual, another fun puzzle from Gozo and great blog as well.I would just add “tea” in 23d to the themed words.

    Thanks to Gozo and Cineraria.

19. I see Diane@10’s got in before me, with 16d “PROST!“[rate]. It’s Basque, (not just German) for “Cheers!”.
    There’s also half of “Chin-Chin!” (Basque equivalent “Txin-Txin!”) in 2d CAPUCHINS. [“Sláinte!“]

20. Rudolf@16 re 11ac: I agree that this may well not have been the setter’s intention, but I took up the challenge of whether the clue could be made to work grammatically anyway. My first thought was that it would count as an indirect anagram, but then it occurred to me that all of the letters of the anagram fodder are in the clue as the anagram result. I did some searching on this site for “reverse anagram” and found this as a recent typical example, 1 across from FT 17,948 by Flimsy
    https://www.fifteensquared.net/2025/01/14/financial-times-17948-by-flimsy/

    This could make Clare go away (5,3)

    The answer is CLEAR OFF. In this case, both the anagram fodder (CLEAR) and the anagram indicator (OFF) have to be inferred as part of the answer, but the anagram result is in the clue. It seems to me that my reading of 11ac today should be at least as acceptable as the example I have just cited.

    N.B. I prefer the term “inverse anagram” to “reverse anagram” simply to avoid a clash with the meaning of “reverse” in describing clues such as 27ac from today.

21. PB@20 Point taken, although, in my view, the present wording would not constitute fair use of such a device. Clues of that sort neeed to include a pointer that things are to be turned the other way round.

22. But 11a is not a reverse anagram, it’s a straight anagram, so how is the Clare example to the point? Whether a clue says ‘By arranging this fodder you can get this solution’ or ‘You can get this fodder by arranging the solution to this’ is surely a matter of convention, not of sense. I don’t have a problem with it, and have a feeling that eg Don Manley arranges things that way round often enough.

23. Can’t find one that’s just the same, but these two Bradman clues:
    Danger from missile to make one hectic or mad (8) RICOCHET
    Senility could make date go wrong (6) DOTAGE
    both have ‘from this solution you might construct this anagram’

24. 11ac: Apologies to everyone for letting things become unnecessarily complicated. I have no difference on any matter of substance with James@22, only of terminology. It seems self evident to me that the following two instructions have the same set of possible answers, and are therefore equally fair:
    1. Find a word by rearranging the letters of “Tax a novice”;
    2. Find a word whose letters may be rearranged to give “Tax a novice”.
    I was (perhaps unwisely) using the term “inverse anagram” to include option 2, which certainly fits Gozo’s wording in 11ac. I should have stopped there.

    Edit: Thanks to James@23 for giving examples of the type I was hoping to find.

25. Concerning 2 down, is there a negative implication in “urchin”? I think of an urchin as a unfortunate waif, not necessarily a scoundrel, though of course an urchin could be a scoundrel.

26. 2dn: Collins 2023 (p 2187) gives “a mischievous roguish child, esp one who is young, small, or raggedly dressed” as its first definition for the noun urchin. For scoundrel it has “a worthless or villainous person” on p 1786.

27. James@23 The examples you give are fair to the solver because they make it clear, by using link words “to make” and “could make”, that something is to be got by forming an anagram of something else. Further it is explicit that the anagram indicators, “mad” and “go wrong” are to be applied to the fodder and not to the definition. That is not the case in the construction in 11A, and, as I’ve said, I doubt that the setter had such an interpretation in mind for this clue.

    I suspect that neither of the Bradman clues would be likely to find favour with, for example, the Times crossword editors because they take the form of DEFINITION produces WORDPLAY.

28. Thanks Gozo for the fun. I found the drinks in the ‘cabinet’ but I circled CHANG instead of CHA. (Chang is a Tibetan rice beer that I had on a trek there a number of years ago.) My favourite clues were PROSTRATE, SPORTSCAR, GRIN, and ARCHANGEL. Thanks Cineraria for the blog.
    [Roz @17: Getting bagpipes as one enters Hades brings to mind a Far Side cartoon where those entering heaven receive harps and those entering hell get accordions.]

29. Congratulations to all that finished this. I missed Skirl (I didn’t think there was such a word). I should’ve looked it up as it was obvious from the wordplay. Also missed Neale whom I’ve never heard of.

30. [ Yes Tony@28 the accordion is the other one . A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but doesn’t . ]

31. I agree with Rudolf – the anagrind in 11a is pointing at digs. This is not the first such example I have seen, nor the last I am sure

    I also agree with Roz@30 & Tony@28: the bagpipes and the accordion are two of the five instruments of the apocalypse.

    Thanks again all

32. Martin, I know you won’t see this but I have to ask, what are the other three instruments of the apocalypse?

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