Financial Times 18,144 by MOO

22 comments on “Financial Times 18,144 by MOO”

1. A real curate’s egg for me. There were several clues I really liked, but also several I strongly disliked.

   I was rather disappointed about what a sparse grid I faced after I working through the across clues. Happily I found the downs were more accommodating. I also thought it was not an easy grid with just four letters linking top and bottom halves, and I had the top half finished before making much impact on the bottom half.

   I really liked the surface of LAST RESORT, ERECT, PARTY, ATTLEE, and BAD HAIR DAY

   I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to parse BEDROOM while TARTARE held mysteries too.

   I think I know what he was trying to do with BELT UP, but it did not work for me. I agree with the blogger that COMPLETE is also not quite right. Nice to be told I should know who Sheeran is and that his name is Ed. Given it is a cryptic clue, it is rather bizarre that I should know DOULA (which I have never heard of). 14ac: the Teds must be very long in the tooth by now. 22 sub = loan is not in my dictionary

   Thanks Moo and Cineraria

2. Martyn@1: Ed Sheeran is a very successful English pop singer.
   A doula is essentially a birthing coach.
   “Sub” is in Chambers: “subsistence money, hence, a loan, an advance payment.”
   I had the same thought about Teddy Boys.

3. Nice puzzle. Detailed blog.
   Thanks Moo and Cineraria.

   Liked BEDROOM, WAR CHEST, B H DAY, SPARE TYRE, PROFITEER and ALONE.

4. Cineraria – oh, that Ed Sheeran! I was so blinkered thinking the clue was referring to a football commentator, and even the reverse parsing failed to bring me to my senses

   Thanks for doula. I have no children and I have no idea whether I would know the word if I had kids.

   I am not surprised some dictionary had sub=loan and thanks for the steer.

   Thanks too for taking the time to respond.

5. Good puzzle overall but needed help for doula. Liked bad hair day, spare tyre. Found it slow across and quicker down.

6. Yep, DOULA was my LOI and I had to reveal it (I’ve even worked, temporarily, mind, in an antenatal clinic!) My favourites were the same as James P’s. ‘Neds’ not ‘teds’ was not first thought re 14ac (Martyn’s comment tickled me) but I had enough crossers to see my way to the right answer.

7. I found the top half impenetrable on first glance, so went down to the bottom and worked back, at which point everything made more sense, not unusual for me, has to be said. JANITOR eluded for a while, as I’ve always considered that to be a sort of factotum in overalls, until I recalled that both January and Janitor share the common ancestry of Janus… other penny drops included recalling that Taxi drivers were/are exempt from the mandatory seat belt law!! So I felt it was all fair, perhaps with the exception of DOULA, altho I read that it’s from a Greek word so I assume has been used since antiquity..? Every day a school day…
   Thanks MOO n Cineraria

8. ARSENAL for the second time in a few days!

   DOULA was a new one for me, and I had to reveal it. Haven’t heard that term before in crossword parlance, by the way

9. Thanks Moo and Cineraria

   I think Moo is generally a very fair setter, but on this occasion I think 1D goes too far. A lesser-spotted vocabulary item with no wordplay at all to give a steer – mind you, Chambers Word Wizard only gives three options, so it smacks of being painted into a corner.

   Sub as an advance on wages is in the OED with first use cited as 1866.

10. Thanks Moo (except for 1dn) and Cineraria

    1dn: I am with others on this. One part clues give solvers no chance if we cannot get the idea immediately.

    26ac and 17dn seem to me to use the same grammatical distortion. I am not keen on it, but I would rather have it twice in a puzzle than just once. If you can solve one of the clues from other information, you can see what Moo is doing and use that fact in the other clue.

    Martyn@1: I am a strong believer in well connected grids, but four letters joining top and bottom halves seems to me quite normal, and anyway I make it five in today’s grid.

11. I suppose your view of DOULA depends on how unusual you think the word is. Once you have dismissed the possibility of a double definition, it’s the only possible answer. I agree with PB about 26a and 17d. BEDROOM was my favourite.

12. Petert@11: One possible measure of how unusual DOULA is can be found from this site’s search engine, which directs you to this puzzle, and to an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from September 2018 – and that is all. I note that all of the full anagrams in this puzzle are at least nine letters long, but would it really have been impossible to find an anagram indicator to fill the gap in this possible clue? Raging is one possibility
    Labour supporter ———– aloud (5)

13. We got through this quite quickly, but needed a wordfinder for DOULA; having got it, though, we vaguely remembered it from somewhere – not sure when or where. Nice to see JANITOR correctly defined; a crossword elsewhere yesterday used it to define ‘caretaker’. We agree that teds may not be known to younger solvers; we last encountered one over 40 years ago, looking very smart in full ‘regalia’ and on his best behaviour. Favourite was BAD HAIR DAY.
    Thanks, Moo and Cineraria.

14. Big Al@13: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2007 p 1453) has janitor as a noun with two definitions:
    1 A doorkeeper, a porter, hist. an ostler. (This is dated from mid 16th century)
    2 A caretaker of a building, esp. a school, responsible for its cleaning, heating, etc. (Dated from early 18th century)

    While I am back in, can I clarify my main purpose in comment 12? I was not trying to optimise the clue for 1dn, or even to claim that a one part clue should not have been allowed. All I was trying to do was show that a one part clue was not necessary. Perhaps I would have done better to make the claim and regard it as self-evident.

15. As I was unable to get PURITAN I had only the D and A of DOULA. I made what I thought was a valiant effort (but doomed to fail) with DOBRA. My thinking was that at a long stretch, labour=do and supporter =bra and I was aware of the fact that there is a footballer called Dobra and thought perhaps he might be well known for being a supporter of the Labour Party. I’ve never heard of DOULA, either in crosswords or anywhere else.
    The true intellectuals amongst us will be familiar with janitors from the occasional appearance of one in The Bash Street Kids. In England schools have caretakers but in Scotland I believe they are called janitors, and the Beano is a Scottish publication. I didn’t know the term also meant doorman, but guessed that it did.

16. It’s interesting, because I knew DOULA as a word, needed the crossers, so didn’t think it was that helpful without more hint than a cryptic definition, but knew the word without using any aids. It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time – single mothers or those whose husbands would prefer not/are unable to be present for the birth of their children do use DOULAs, and I’ve heard discussions and read about that happening.

    Thank you to Moo and Cineraria

17. I haven’t seen the movie in a few decades, but was Rita actually educated by the end of it or was she still in the process?

18. HM@17 I think you can be educated in the sense of experiencing education without becoming educated, but I seem to recall that she did.

19. Pathetic clue for 1d

    Got the rest speedily by my standards

    Editor – big failure allowing that life-wasting howler.

20. Correction to 10: I hold to the view that one part clues give solvers no chance if we cannot unpick the setter’s one idea, but I was wrong to use the word “immediately”.

21. If 1d was allowed as a straightforward definition, DOULA, then why could 19d not be WELCOME? (Being a “friendly drink”).

    As I first thought before I had any letters and corrected to CORDIAL. Doesn’t that sort of clue go against the concept of a cryptic crossword? (I.e. being a straightforward definition).

22. Once again some solvers reach the conclusion that, if the setter uses a word they don’t know, the clue is inherently unfair and the editor incompetent.

    I like the occasional two-word clue, such as 1d DOULA and 19d CORDIAL. Brevity can be the soul of wit. And 1d was cryptic – the surface was intended to make you think politics, not childbirth.

    As it happens, my daughter-in-law used a doula for her first pregnancy, so the word was familiar to me, and it didn’t occur to me that it was an obscure word.

    Thanks Moo (and the editor) for the fun puzzle, and Cineraria for the excellent blog.

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