Financial Times 17,921 by BOBCAT

28 comments on “Financial Times 17,921 by BOBCAT”

1. Enjoyed this very much.
   Faves included PROCLAIM, SHANDY, ORGANZA, INVEIGLER and YOURSELF.
   Spotted the literary feline nina but needed this to confirm the unknown (to me) PARI PASSU.
   Thanks to Bobcat and Teacow.

2. Greatly enjoyed this fun puzzle and excellent blog.
   Typo in 27ac HYPHEN.

   Thanks to both

3. Like Diane, I enjoyed this a lot.
   A few small errors in the blog. 1a should have PR(evious) (headquarter not headhalf), HYPHEN is misspelled and 4d may be described as a CAD but not an &lit.

4. Thanks SM@2 and Hovis@3. Have fixed the typos, not in the image though.

5. Thanks Bobcat and Teacow

   Teacow, there’s another correction needed in the blog: 20 is “the choice of WomeN’s skirts”.

6. Really enjoyed this puzzle, and my LOI (ITERATES) was helped by the central Nina. Great start to the week. Thanks B and T

7. I should add that I parsed 1d as PAS( secretaries) visiting PARIS with U as per blog

8. Would someone please explain 28A to me. I get the definition but I don’t understand how “in good form” means “yourself”.

   5D held me up for a while as I thought that “notes” meant “A,B,C,D.E, F or G” – (I am a musician after all). But then I have never seen “The Sound of Music”.

   21D : I did not know what “oatcake” is. I was surprised to find that it is Scottish as it sounds American.

   Thanks Teacow and all the other contributors.

9. 28a it’s in Chambers. As to how you’d use it in a sentence, 🤷‍♂️

10. If you’re not ‘looking yourself’, you might be feeling unwell.
    Conversely, if you feel like your old self again, you’re feeling better. Or, if ‘she was her usual (sparkling) self’, for instance, she was ‘in good form’.

11. SM@7… Thanks, I’ve fixed this.

12. Thank you to Admin and Diane, but it is not an expression that I know. English is not my first language.

13. 4d INVEIGLER I wouldn’t describe either as &lit or CAD, rather a straight clue with an unusual structure: a person that in a wordplay sense is an anagram of relieving and in a definition sense is persuasive.
    Headquarters was neat. Curious rogue ‘is’ in 21d.

14. I also enjoyed this

    I had a tick against EPSILON

    Thanks for the help parsing SEATS. I have never seen tiny portion = RAG, and the use of headquarters in 1a was new to me too but seemed to work well.
    Claudia@8, I was not a big fan of notes = re and te.

    If I could choose, I would drop the Nina and found a better word than EPIGLOTTIS

    Thanks Bobcat and Teacow

15. This puzzle was a stretch for me, and took a long time to untangle.
    Lots of very good setting, but a few that ” could do better”, to my mind.

    8(ac) “tiny portion” = RAG. Not for me.
    14(ac), I take to be tableware in the plural, viz, “plate” and “glass”. No idea how ” displayed” plays its part.
    20(ac) , I parsed as W OR N, thus the outer letters of “women”, choose W or N.
    28(ac) where “in good form” is supposed to equate to YOURSELF?? Sorry. That’s just beyond my understanding.
    1(down) PARI PASSU is a term usually used in business for shares which rank equally, in terms of votes and dividends. I cannot see how this means “together”.

    I liked a lot of this puzzle, ( Head Quarters in 1(ac) is a superb clue; AFTERGLOW for 6(down) is even better).

    I felt like two different setters had come up with this crossword.

16. Completed but a bit ho-hum for me. My usual grumble that some of the cryptic bit was vague / unclear / unconvincing . 28A Yourself being a good example. Easy anagram to solve but just not clear why it was the answer (thanks for the explanation, Diane@10) . I really don’t like what I call “too clever by half” cryptic clues. Clearly others love them. Worn was another example and Plate Glass a third, where I got the answer but just wasn’t entirely convinced by it.

17. An enjoyable workout even if we were a bit stretched in places. A lovely PDM when we got EPIGLOTTIS; others we liked included SANS SERIF and OATCAKE. A nice nina, too.
    Thanks, Bobcat and Teacow.

18. Thanks Teacow.

    1ac: I cannot find a meaning for the single word headquarters that makes this clue work, so it appears to be an unsignalled splitting of the word. However many people like this device, I do not. Thanks to Bobcat for the rest of the puzzle.

    8ac; Chambers 2016 p 1287 gives “a shred, scrap or tiny portion” as a meaning for rag¹.

    1dn: Chambers p 1122 defines pari passu as “with equal pace; together”.

    5dn: it could be argued that re and te belong to different versions of the tonic sol-fa, but in my view that would be too pedantic.

19. Thanks Bobcat for the challenge. After a painfully slow start I managed to both finish and enjoy this. My favourites were PROCLAIM (COTD), NOVA SCOTIA, UNRESERVED, ORGANZA, and EPSILON. I couldn’t parse SANS SERIF. I didn’t look for a feline Nina but it didn’t matter because I never heard of MACAVITY. Thanks Teacow for the blog.

20. I didn’t enjoy this at all. Too much pedantry in the clueing. I won’t be attempting another Bobcat offering again in a hurry.

21. @ 20 Will
    A better articulation of my grumble.

22. Pelham@19…. Late comment we know but we think “headquarters” in 1Ac works because it is the first two letters of 4 eight letter words i.e the head quarters?

23. Piratewatch@22 re 1ac:
    Thank you for that. If the clue had said “head quarters” as two words, I would have been happy with that, and indeed had the same praise for it as many others. It would work because the cryptic process would start with the meaning of quarters as fourth parts. However, the only meanings I can find in the standard dictionaries for the single word headquarters relate to the word quarters in the sense of housing or accommodation etc. So there appear to be two ways to make the clue work: either a jump from one meaning of quarters to another part way through the solving process, or the insertion of a space without any indication for it. I do not approve of either of these. I assumed the latter, which I know does have widespread approval. I have come to accept that clues of that type will appear from time to time in the FT, but I do not approve of them, and will not thank setters for including them. My usual policy when such a clue appears in a crossword is not to make a comment at all if I have nothing else to say about the puzzle, but, if I am going to make a comment about something else, I will mention the clue in question and remind the world that the device used does not have universal approval.

24. PB@23 Much as I agree with you about the sloppy device of splitting words such as INSOLENT into “IN SOLENT” to indicate the insertion of something into SOLENT, there is a major difference to be drawn between that and the cryptic interpretation of, say, DISCOVERED to indicate the removal of outer letters. That is a whimsical/cryptic interpretation of a word, akin to the use of BANKER or FLOWER to indicate a river. In the present instance, as the word HEADQUARTERS actually means “the leading quarters”, there is no requirement for the solver to split the word into two parts. The same can be argued for UNDERGROUND, to which you drew attention in another FT puzzle, to be interpreted as “under ground”.

25. Rudolf@24: I must ask you to believe that I would be delighted to find a way of making 1ac work of which I could approve. Thank you for your comments, which are helpful, but do not quite get me there – at least not yet. Looking up discover again, I find that the meaning “to uncover” is in both Chambers 2016 and SOED 2007 marked as obsolete. It is easy in crossword terms to accept the revival of this meaning, using the prefix dis-, which is in the dictionaries. Similarly, words like “banker” and “flower” for river can be constructed using dictionary meanings of the suffix -er. Can you give me a respectable source for headquarters actually meaning “the leading quarters” which fits with the required meaning for this clue? That would certainly solve the problem, but I did not find one in any of Chambers, Collins 2023, ODE 2010, or SOED. If I just missed it, I really want to know. It did not occur to me before writing comment 18 to look for head- as a prefix, but I did so before writing comment 23, and have since looked for -quarter(s) as a suffix. None of my four dictionaries have either of these. I am very reluctant to go down the path of unlimited compounding in English words, and all the definitions of headquarters that I found in my four dictionaries were specifically related to the “wrong” meaning of quarters. I have just checked them again. Further help is most welcome.

26. PB@25 I accept your assurance that none of the main dictionaries provide explicit support. That’s why I said that it is necessary to regard it as a cryptic interpretation of the word. If the headquarters of a company is its chief/head office, then it is its leading office. The step to saying that it is its leading quarters is the cryptic element.

    If DISCOVERED is to be interpreted as UNCOVERED in a clue where no “obsolete” indicator is provided, then I should regard the clue as being unfair if a meaning marked as obsolete in the dictionary were to be regarded as the sole justification. In such circumstances I should not regard the clue as being unfair if the intention were to justify the meaning via the whimsical interpretation. Perhaps it would have been better if I were to have given the example of the use of DISHEARTENED as a whimsical core removal indicator – as far as I’m aware there is no dictionary justication for that meaning of the word.

    In any event, to return to my main point, I am entirely with you in objecting to the sort of nonsense that requires words to be artificially split or joined together in ways that distort their meanings. For example, COLTSFOOT in a down clue to indicate T, justified by COLT’S FOOT. Something such as MIDNIGHT for G, on the other hand, would, in my view, be acceptable on the basis of reading the word as “middle of night”. But I do not accept SWEETHEART as being a fair indication for E, as the word does not mean “heart of sweet”.

    I’ll sign off here, as I have nothing to add, except to say that I hope to have persuaded you that it’s a bit harsh to lump all this sort of stuff together as being unjustifiable. After all, cryptic interpretation of words lies at the heart of this pastime

27. Rudolf@26: Thanks once more for that. I certainly am not lumping everything together: there are shades of grey and discussion with you has moved my approval boundary closer to yours. Unfortunately, this clue still lies in the gap. I would have no problem with something like “hindquarters of freakish earthman and landlady” for SHANDY (picking the next across answer from this grid), because I can find suitable definitions of hindquarters such as “the rear parts of an animal” (that is the one in Chambers) and I am prepared to make the jump from “parts” to “fourth parts”. The jump from “offices” to “fourth parts” seems to me to be wider, and critically so.
    With regard to “discovered” as an indicator, I would justify this on the prefix dis-: the fact that the required meaning is in two dictionaries but marked obsolete is really a bit of a red herring. Perhaps a good counterpart to “midnight” for G, which I can now accept, might be “midden” or “midget” for E, neither of which would work for me.
    I think we have now gone as far as we usefully can, and I am happy to agree to differ at this point.

28. Regarding PROCLAIM, I think it’s fair enough as in head [leading] and quarters [parts] – consider “I returned to my quarters at midnight.” i.e. the part of a building or complex where one stays or “The boxer asked for no quarter in the fight.” i.e. a part of the competition to be surrendered.

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