Financial Times 17,314 by BRADMAN

30 comments on “Financial Times 17,314 by BRADMAN”

1. I echo Oriel’s sentiments on this puzzle, particularly re the parsing of BUS.S which I didn’t know but guessed.
   I particularly enjoyed the definition for 4d, 9d and the ‘aviator’ in 22a.
   Thanks to Bradman for the enjoyable workout and Oriel for the blog.
   And RIP, Gaufrid.

2. Sorry, but I didn’t like this. Unless there is something I’m missing in 1d, the use of just a 4-letter word “demo” seems extremely weak. Also the ‘&lit’ for 15a doesn’t work for me. Learnt a couple of new words in CAITIFF and PROTISTA. BUSS for a “frigid spinster” was also unknown to me but the answer was clear.

3. Hovis@2
   1d seems just that. I have come across a similar one quite some time ago.
   15a seems weaker to me (not a difficult anagram to work out though).
   Guessed the meaning of BUSS. Didn’t know it.

   Loved LACKADAY and TAKE PART.
   Thanks, Bradman and Oriel!

4. Thanks for the blog. I, too, agree with your overall assessment. (The description that came to mind for me was “weird,” and more that once I was thinking, “Does he mean . . . . ?,” but the clues all ultimately seemed sound, and I must also commend the anagrams.) I could not parse UNIONIST, but of course it looks obvious now. I think ALPHABETICALLY also suggests that in a demonstration, the steps are often laid out as A, B, C, etc., so really a clever clue. The Buss reference was particularly obscure, but I wrote in what fit and moved on.

5. *than*

6. Hovis@2
   Order followed by KLM, but reversed by BA(12)
   I was wrong to say ‘a similar one’.

7. If you don’t allow letter repeats, it’s difficult to come up with long words in alphabetical order but the clue doesn’t need to restrict itself to just one word. Even adding the word “almost”, as an example, to the end of the clue would be better imo but others may well differ.

8. I’m another who has never heard of Miss Buss and Miss Beale. The answer was obvious from the definition and the cross letters but, even an internet search for “frigid spinster” and “buss” didn’t reveal a solution. So thanks, Oriel. Isn’t the definition a little bit aggressive and faintly offensive to women who choose not to marry?

   25A was new to me but, having filled in all letters apart from the first, the anagram only allowed “P” as the first letter. An internet search led me to another unknown word: “eukaryotic”.

   Ahh 7A: “Hi ho, alas, and also lackaday” from Ella Fitzgerald’s “But Not For Me”. What a great word which we don’t use anymore; just like we cannot play Jo Stafford’s “When Our Hearts Were Young and Gay”. So sad…

9. Another example of Pasquale masquerading as Bradman and I found this tough going. I couldn’t parse BUS PASS, had never heard of MAGNETOSPHERE or PROTISTA and barely recognised CAITIFF. Spent a while on TETHER, for which the order of the parts of the wordplay was the reverse of what I expected for a down clue and failed on BAPTISM OF FIRE, a good cryptic def. Favourite was LACKADAY – not an anagram after all.

   Thanks to Bradman and Oriel

10. WordPlodder @9. Fortunately, I often think “ether” when given “number”, so TETHER went straight in. I do agree that the order is one you would normally associate with an across clue with the opposite for a down clue. Perhaps long time solvers will know if this use is unprecedented or not.

11. WP@9 and Hovis@10
    Interesting observations on down/across clues. I didn’t notice it, but I agree with you.

12. Haven’t we had a discussion about on in a down clue before? A fly can be on the floor or on the ceiling was the conclusion I recall.
    Thanks both.

13. Thanks Bradman and Oriel

    Further to the discussion about 5dn, my understanding is as follows. “X on Y” can take (at least) two different senses of the word “on”. The sense “supported by” only really works for a down clue, and means X followed by Y. However, the senses “against” or “in addition to” work in either an across clue or a down clue for Y followed by X.

14. Further to 13, “on” can also mean “close to, beside” which works in an across clue for either X followed by Y or Y followed by X. The conclusion I come to is that “on” can mean joining either way in both across clues and down clues.

15. Thanks Sourdough and Pelham Barton. There does seem to be quite a few words in cryptic crossword land that can mean one thing or it’s opposite. For example, I’ve seen “block” to indicate an inclusion (as in blocking a pipe say) or a surround (as in blocking a harbour say by surrounding it). Nothing wrong with that – indeed I quite like it.

16. Hear, hear, Hovis

17. The point here for the usage of ON is that this is a crossword by Don Manley, for whom a transgression against convention such as we see here would be anathema. Thus I’m sure that it is a slip, most definitely unintended, even in the FT, which does not as far as I know necessarily require useful guidelines to be observed.

18. The use of “on” as a juxtaposition indicator is surprisingly contentious, as it is something that the purists seem to disagree about. The Clue Clinic, which is highly regarded by many Ximenean setters (and is aimed at AZED aficionados) says that the construction “x on y” can be used in both across and down clues to mean either “x before y” or “x after y”.

    On the other hand, Dean Mayer (Anax), a very highly-regarded setter, is quite categorical in this article (https://crypticcrosswords.net/crosswords/cryptic-crosswords-the-rules/4/) which appears on Big Dave’s site, that the convention is that in an across clue “x on y” means “x after y” and in a down clue it means “x before y”. The article was written some years ago, and I do not know if Dean’s views have changed since then.

    The Chambers Crossword Dictionary is even more restrictive: it gives “on” as a juxtaposition indicator for down clues only.

19. In The Times the on value gives YX and XY for across and down respectively. Unless I’ve missed one. I suspect this is also true for The DT, but not totally sure about that either. But it’s certainly what a lot of us do regardless of a puzzle’s destination.

    All I’ll say is that the observing of conventions shouldn’t hamper a decent compiler (as there’s always a way around anything), and that consistency, implied as it is by tradition, is helpful to solvers.

20. Thanks, Bradman & Oriel.

    I rather liked 1d. Clever to find a word that has the letters in the right order and gives a plausible yet misleading surface. Aegilops would have been nonsensical.

    Different setters, editors and solvers have different but equally strongly held opinions on how “on” may be used. So who is right? As Paul b says, conventions are helpful to solvers. You just need to know which conventions each publication subscribes to.

21. Thanks to those who have added to the discussion on the use of “on”. I agree that it can be helpful to solvers if setters stick to fixed rules, provided that they do not go to the extreme of using their preferred convention to justify a particular reading of an otherwise ambiguous clue. In my view, if you reach the point where solvers need to know which conventions are being applied, you have gone from being helpful to the reverse.

    To illustrate my point, consider the following clue, which I have made up for the purpose of discussion:

    Knockout carrying unknown on to city in Japan (5).

    This gives us [K(Y)O on TO], which could be either KYOTO or TOKYO. I would hope that any respectable publication would reject that clue on the grounds of ambiguity (and possibly on either grounds as well). I do not think it would be helpful to solvers to argue that this clue unambiguously indicates TOKYO as an across clue and KYOTO as a down clue.

22. Correction to 21: In the last paragraph, the part in brackets should of course read “(and possibly on other grounds as well)”.

23. Interesting example, PB. Did you see this Brendan puzzle last June? Guardian 28,769

24. Obviously in #21 Pelham means to imply that The Guardian is not a respectable publication.

25. Widdersbel@23: Thank you for that. I did not see that puzzle, but it does not contradict my main point. I would regard it as acceptable to depart from normal expectations provided that the departure is signalled sufficiently. In the case of Brendan’s puzzle, the repeated clues give such a signal.

    Paul@24: I was forgetting that some people connected with The Guardian positively approve of isolated ambiguous clues.

26. Thank you Oriel and Bradman. About half of this I thought was clever and the other half was too clever by half

27. PB – of course, that Brendan one was a special case and doesn’t contradict your point. Just thought your choice of example was funny as it reminded me of that puzzle.

28. Widdersbel@27: thanks for that.

29. Peter@8 : Yes, I agree. I’d not heard of Frances Buss, but now I’ve read the brief biography on her Wikipedia page. Evidently she was an extraordinarily brilliant pioneering human being. At the age of 10, she was sent to a school in Hampstead and within four years was teaching classes there, and at 16 was occasionally left in charge of the whole place. She was the first person to ever use the title “Headmistress” and throughout her adult life she founded multiple educational institutions as well as being active in the women’s suffrage movement.

    And yet the first thing listed in the “legacy” section of the Wikipedia article is a tawdry little “satirical” “poem”. There’s no satire there. Those four lines are there to cut those two women down to size. I imagine it’s because of their political activism, but who knows?

    That was in the 19th century. We are now in the 21st century. I do not find it acceptable to describe anyone as a “frigid spinster”.

30. Regarding the comment @18 and the related discussion, as the custodian of the Clue Clinic site my thoughts concerning ‘on’ as a juxtaposition indicator can be summed up as follows:

    I am pretty uncompromising in my views on many constructions and indicators. However, the preposition ‘on’ is not only given by the Chambers as ‘in contact with the upper, supporting, outer or presented surface of’ but also as ‘close to, beside’. As far as I’m concerned, theses senses clearly justify the use of ‘A on B’ to indicate all possibilities (before/after, across/down). Personally, I would steer well clear of ‘A on B’ to indicate BA in a down entry, since while it may be justifiable in theory (“there’s a fly on the ceiling”) it appears counterintuitive and is unlikely to be well received by solvers.

    Incidentally, Azed regularly uses ‘A on B’ to indicate AB in across clues.

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