Financial Times 17,980 by MUDD

24 comments on “Financial Times 17,980 by MUDD”

1. 20ac Cf. ‘The project is nearing completion’ . Think this is ok for nearly or almost. You may be right about ‘tricks’ doing double duty, Loonapick, but that is something I like, personally!

   Nice crossie and great blog.

2. LITTLE SLAM is an &Lit but perhaps nearing is a misprint ? Could be nearly or not there at all ?

3. Or perhaps just about okay, “nearing securing last” could mean you have 12 , does not read very well though .

4. Thanks for the blog, pretty good puzzle overall . WHISTLE-BLOWER is very neat , a bit of 80s slang and it avoids the obvious “ref” or “painter” .

5. Roz@2 The inclusion of “what Mary had”, which had nothing to do with the solution means that, in my opinion, it isn’t an &lit.

   Steven@ – nearing and nearly are not interchangeable in your example.

6. I thought along the same lines as Roz @2. ‘What Mary had’ can refer to the person playing bridge. Felt it was a clunky clue that didn’t quite work. I assumed EYEBALL was ‘eye’ = ‘consider’ + ‘ball’ = ‘function’ with ‘eyeball’ as ‘organ’. Happy to be corrected.

7. Further thoughts on LITTLE SLAM sorry , back to my original , nearly is needed to remove the B from LITTLE LAMB . I will shut up now.

8. Loonapick I took it that – What Mary had … was the LITTLE SLAM because she took 12 tricks.

9. I cast my vote for the suspected typo. With ‘nearly’ instead of ‘nearing’ and Mary being the card player with all but one of the tricks, then the clue is certainly close to CAD.

   I thought LIE DOWN was a super anagram; the def for ROOTLET made me smile; I enjoyed the constructions of HANDGUN and OVERCAST and the clues for LADIES ROOM and DIABOLO are both very clever.

   I wasn’t sure about the ‘A’ in the clue for BENT: the clue works, just about, as a sort of CD but, as a double def, the ‘A’ is problematic because ‘bent’ needs to be adjectival to equate to ‘criminal’? I may be misunderstanding something.

   Thanks Mudd and loonapick

10. Saw “nearing” in 20a LITTLE SLAM as a typo for “nearly”; parsed it as Roz@2,3,4,7, and 8; and liked it. Parsed 26a EYEBALL (correctly, I thought) as Hovis@6.
    Thought the BLOW in 8d WHISTLE-BLOWER meant nose candy, as in Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (2006) “You love blow and I love puff’,
    but Jonathon Green has it meaning opium, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, glue, or crack. [And Blow Monkeys are Coke fiends, like Rish!]

11. For 5d it should have been etc. meaning AND SO FORTH, rather than et al. That means “and other people” alii(m)/aliae(f) or “things” alia(n). {22a – that’s me all over.}

12. Thanks Mudd and Loonapick

    I agree with others that 20ac does not quite work. For the definition, are we to suppose that Mary has already secured the first 12 tricks for her partnership, and is still on course for a Grand Slam with the last trick? That is the best I can do with this clue, but I do not think that meaning is conveyed sufficiently.

    5dn: SOED 2007 p 2901 gives and so forth as “and in other similar ways, and others of the same kind, et cetera”. The second of these works for et alii/aliae/alia.

13. This puzzle took me ages to get a foothold into, but once I did, it all fell eventually, with nothing left unexplained. Tough but fair, in other words.

    Agreed with Frankie that Mudd has his drug lingo mixed up; BLOW is definitely cocaine, not marijuana.

    The LITTLE SLAM clue would definitely work a lot better with nearly rather than nearing, in both surface and wordplay, so I concur that we should treat it as a typo. But I agree with Loonapick that the fact that “What Mary had” sitting out there mars the clues effectiveness as a cad. (Are there any notable bridge players named Mary? Don’t think so.) Oh, and on this side of the Atlantic, I’ve always heard it called a small slam. [I’ve bid and made like maybe two in my life, although to be fair I only play bridge intermittently. I have never bid, let alone made, a grand slam.]

14. In defence of BLOW , Mudd/Paul is a bit older than me but I have noticed he often uses slang terms that I used when younger.
    In the 80s/90s , in the UK , BLOW was definitely Cannabis/marijuana . Dope and weed also used but BLOW the strong favourite.

15. 8dn: Collins 2023 p 223 has blow n “39 a Brit a slang name for cannabis (2) b US a slang name for cocaine“. On page 303 we find cannabis, with meaning 1 as the plant, and meaning 2 as the drug.

    Added in edit: A similar distinction of meaning can be found in Chambers 2016 p 166

16. I found this very hard and it took several visits, and I still missed Bore, not thinking that meant Dullard, so I put in Dope- which obviously has nothing to do with a pig 😂😂

    Little slam was inexplicable to me.

    Thanks

17. If Mary too 12 tricks in one night it was a grand slam.

18. “Sounds rather like what Mary enjoyed. Plenty of tricks.”

19. 20A Probably too late in the day to point out that what Mary had was not LITTLE LAMB, but A LITTLE LAMB, which makes this clue even worse. I agree that “nearing” doesn’t work if my understanding of its meaning – “approaching” – is correct. Strange that it doesn’t seem to appear in any of the one volume dictionaries.

20. Rudolf@19: near as a verb is in Chambers 2016 p 1027 and ODE 2010 p 1185 (and even in the Pocket Oxford 2013 p 605) with the meaning “to approach”. Collins 2023 p 1319 has “to come or draw close (to)”. The word nearing would presumably be regarded as a regular form of that verb, and so not given explicitly.

21. PB@20 Yes, you must be right. Thanks.

22. Re 9A: what does ‘increasingly’ mean in the clue?

23. 9dn (not 9ac): I read this as I for one, V for five, X for ten, etc forming an increasing sequence to define the standard set of Roman numerals.

24. Pelham @23. Thanks for the direction correction. I am sure you are right about the ‘increasingly’, although I think it was a mental leap too far for me!

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