Financial Times 18,125 by GUY

21 comments on “Financial Times 18,125 by GUY”

1. I enjoyed the variety and found several clues quite challenging. I missed the reverse hidden word indicator in ORGY, so thank you for the steer. Otherwise it went smoothly.

   I ticked MASCOT, MALEFACTOR, MISSTEP and GORGEOUS for their nice surfaces.

   Thanks Guy for the puzzle and Cineraria for the reliably good blog

2. Thanks Guy for a top-notch crossword. I thought this was on the gentler end of Guy’s spectrum but no less clever than his trickier offerings. My top picks were REVERIE, FERMENTATION, CROSS-DRESSER, ORGY, EARLY ON, TAKE IT EASY, and EVENSONG. Thanks Cineraria for the blog.

3. I was in the zone today and wrote it almost straight in. Either that was easy or I’m getting better!

4. Pedants’ corner: 14a fermentation is fungal rather than bacterial decay isn’t it?

   And 15d the building society is the mortgager not mortgagee?

5. James P@4: Yeast, but also bacteria, e.g., Lactobacillus. The mortgagee is the lender, not the borrower.

6. To elaborate, you give a mortgage on your property to secure a loan; the mortgage is that security interest, not the loan itself. In theory (at least centuries ago) but not in practice, the two are separable. (Incidentally, the “mort” in “mortgage” isn’t accidental; tres macabre.) Anyway, the mortgagor is the borrower, and the mortgagee is the lender.

   I would never have come up with BAT for “be in”; cricket still catches up to me sometimes. I entered that one without parsing. Thanks to Cineraria for explaining. I still swear that one of these days I will compose a baseball-themed cryptic for revenge purposes.

7. I’ve floundered with some of Guy’s in the past, but I flew through this. Must’ve been on the right wavelength.

8. Thanks Guy and Cineraria

   15dn: Further to earlier comments, Collins 2023 p 1284 gives us “mortgagee n law 1 the party to a mortgage who makes the loan 2 a person who holds mortgaged property as security for a loan”. This clue is obviously using meaning 1. And please do not let anyone claiming specialist knowledge persuade you that the other meaning is wrong. Words do not belong to specialists, they belong to the whole community. In my view, setters are entitled to use words in any sense that is understood by the community, and to use the standard dictionaries as appropriate evidence for such use.

9. Great crossword.

   Lots of ticks.

   NHO mascot= lucky child.

   Easier end of Guy spectrum?

10. Moly @9 – in UK football games, the players are often accompanied onto the pitch by children – child mascots. There’s more here. Some teams have adopted sick children, for example, Bradley Lowery

    Thank you for the blog and puzzle, Cineraria and Guy.

11. I enjoyed this. The top hall went in really quickly but the bottom half took a while.

    Favourites were: MALEFACTOR (lovely word), REVERIE, SHAKEN, EVENSONG, GORGEOUS

    Thanks Guy and Cineraria

12. Some days it can take forever to think of the right fish, but today HAKE was the first that came to mind. A very enjoyable puzzle. Thanks, both.

13. Pelham @8: I wasn’t saying (or at least trying to say) that either one of those meanings was wrong, for the record.

    Petert @12: yeah, sometimes it feels like literally every short string of letters is a fish (at least every one that isn’t a river); but HAKE did come quickly to me too this time.

14. mrpenney@13; I agree that you did not say either meaning was wrong, but I thought someone else might, and decided to try to forestall that possibility, or at least to save one round of the argument if anyone did. In any case, of course, Guy has stuck to the official meaning in this puzzle.

15. This discussion of the meaning of words reminds me of Alice Through the Looking-Glass – ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ Well, at least we can be thankful that setters don’t adopt a Humpty Dumpty approach.

    Thanks to Guy for the enjoyment nand Cineraria for the explanations.

16. Thanks for an enjoyable puzzle and blog. I had a slight quibble about the definition element of BATHE. To be in what? water of course, but no indication of this.
    At the risk of being boring, and not wishing to get embroiled in the argument about whether popular meanings are acceptable even if technically wrong, I think the two definitions given of MORTGAGEE are actually saying the same thing. When a person (the mortgagor) borrows money to acquire property, it was formerly the custom in English law for the property to be vested in the lender, not the borrower, until the loan was paid off. Even today there are “deeming provisions“ which mean that the lender owns a stake in the property itself, so that the lender has something of worth in case the borrower defaults.
    I should stop writing this sort of stuff. I retired from the law years ago.

17. As an indisputably boring ex-lawyer, I would say that I agree with Babbler@16: the two definitions in Collins cited by PB@8 both seem to me to refer clearly to the lender.

18. 16/17: Perhaps I was a bit hasty in interpreting the definitions from Collins 2023. According to the guide to the use of the dictionary, the subject-field label law is used “to indicate that a word or sense is used in a particular specialist or technical field” (p xii). I can readily accept that, within the specialist field of law, the words in definition 2 of mortgagee mean what lawyers take them to mean, even if that is the opposite of the meaning that seems natural to me. What is less clear to me is whether the subject-field label means that the use of the word is restricted to the specialist field given. Fortunately the soundness of the clue in today’s puzzle does not depend on the answer to that question.

19. Everyone says they’ll get a mortgage when they mean they’ll get a loan and give a mortgage. But I wouldn’t expect someone to use the term mortgagee to describe themselves in that situation, if only because it’s not used much outside a technical legal context. I had the same thoughts as Babbler and Perplexus about the Collins definitions given by Pelham Barton. If Collins wanted to define mortgagee as the borrower it would use much clearer language. But Chambers does exactly that, rather surprisingly:
    1. A person to whom a mortgage is made or given, ie the lender
    2. Someone who gives or grants a mortgage
    That would seem to make it a rather useless word.

20. Thanks for dropping in, Guy. I would have done better to go to Chambers rather than Collins in the first place.

21. A bit late, but I loved your post Allan-c@15

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