Financial Times 17,951 by ZAMORCA

24 comments on “Financial Times 17,951 by ZAMORCA”

1. My LOi – 13d KIN (clan), where leader K is bottom: INK

2. [11a US<, rather than US*]
   Took 29a DERIDE as a Playtex of eiderdown, "fancy eider" = EIDER* | "down at first" = put a D in front.

3. FrankieG@1: I could not figure out what was going on with INK. I am not 100% sold on the construction of the clue, but I think your suggestion was the intended parsing. This is the usual Zamorca pangram.

4. FOI SOMBRE got a tick, SOI FLEXIBLE brought a frown, GUITAR had nice misdirection.

   Agree that kin becomes INK, but it could be clearer.

   A few questions: how does CHEQUERED = eventful, what is a PUSHCHAIR for a baby, and why is gbp25 pony?

   Thanks Jason and Turbolegs

5. Breezy indeed and thanks for explaining Ink

   Martyn:

   Pony = slang for £25

   Chequered history = eventful past. Presumably something to do with black and white

   Pushchair is another name for a perambulator (Pram)

6. Thanks for the blog, excellent neat clues , I agree with Frankie@1 for INK and DERIDE which is very clever .

   [ PUSHCHAIR – I humbly disagree with Moly , a pram is for babies lying down , a pushchair for toddlers sitting down. Martyn it is basically a seat on four wheels . The McClaren umbrella pushchair was a stunning invention. It could fold up small so I could take the sprogs on public transport, light and robust so I could walk with them on any terrain . ]

7. I wasn’t sure about INK, but FrankieG’s explanation makes sense.

   I loved my umbrella PUSHCHAIR too – I could get it on our local coaches too – no accessible buses for us – and it fitted in the luggage rack.

8. That was fun. Lots of neat clues. My LOI was WIZARD and I was helped by knowing there had to be a Z in it.

   Also didn’t parse INK

   Liked: ONE-TRICK PONY, FURTHER, SOMBRE

   Thanks Zamorca and Turbolegs

9. Liked DERIDE (parsed it as FrankieG@1) and ONE-TRICK PONY.
   FURTHER
   Did the setter intend ‘then’ and ‘advance’ as two defs?

   Thanks Zamorca and Turbolegs.

10. I wasn’t sure how to parse INK, but it’s pretty clear once explained. So £25 is a pony? And another UK-only reference to TANGO, although the wordplay wasn’t too hard. In 24d, is “unwise” an anagrind? Unusual.

11. Hi, just read through the comments hoping for anyone else questioning EN=Space (4D). I guess it must be standard crossword fodder, but not seen it before?

12. Mike@11, it’s a standard printer’s measure. Spaces come in two sizes — the width of an ‘n’ or an ‘m’. Often crop up in cryptics.

13. [Maclaren’s inspiration for the folding pushchair was retractable landing gear on aircraft]

14. Thanks Zamorca and Turbolegs

    29ac: Given that eiderdown actually means “eider down” (ODE 2010 p 563) as well a covering, we do not have to think of this as as an unsignalled splitting of a clue word. Taking the D from down as part of the anagram allows “at first” to indicate the initial letter, so we do not have to worry about the question of whether D is an acceptable abbreviation for the relevant meaning of “down”.

    4dn: I agree with Geoff@12 that em and en spaces are often seen in cryptic crosswords, However, having done some printing myself approximately fifty years ago, I feel I should point out that other sizes of spaces also exist. As I remember it, thick, mid, and thin spaces were respectively one third, one quarter, and one fifth of an em in width.

    15dn: The relevant definition of chequered from the ODE (p 299) is “marked by periods of varied fortune or discreditable incidents: the chequered history of post-war Britain“. This follows the more literal definition “having a pattern consisting of alternating squared of different colours”.

15. Thanks Zamorca for a fun solve. My favourites were URCHIN, ENDORSED, DERIDE, FURTHER, and TUT. I didn’t know ‘pony’ but the answer had to be ‘one-track mind’ (which didn’t parse) or ONE-TRICK PONY which made more sense anyway. I questioned ‘has’ as a link word in NIGHTJAR — has seems more like a containment indicator to me — but I guess a definition ‘has’ wordplay in a sense so I didn’t object. Thanks Turbolegs for the blog.
    [Geoff Down Under @10: If stupid, scattered, and silly can be anagram indicators I think ‘unwise’ can also fit the bill.]

16. This was fun. For an American there were some moments.. CHEQUERED instead of Checkered, SOMBRE instead of somber, PONY for 25 pounds, WIZARD for tremendous, PUSH CHAIR for a stroller. But I get it and enjoy it even.. It’s a British paper and a British crossword. I wish we had good regular editor curated cryptics in the US!

17. 29ac further to earlier comments: It has occurred to me that we could take “at first” as meaning “using an appropriate number of letters from the beginning” and parse this clue simply as telling us to take an anagram of the first six letters of the clue word “eiderdown”. It would have to be the first six letters because that is the length of the answer. That is certainly a stretch of the meaning of “at first”, but to my mind it is far less of a stretch of the language than allowing arbitrary splitting of clue words.

    I am not claiming that Zamorca actually intended the clue to be parsed as I have just suggested, but something I have seen more than once is as follows. A clue was written with an intended parsing that was well within accepted standards. However, someone has suggested a parsing using a device that went outside those standards. Then people may have got the idea that the device suggested was itself acceptable.

    While I am back in, comment 14 should have said “as well as a covering” in the first sentence of the comment on 29ac.

18. I agree with Roz @ 6, though I think the word Pram is often used synonymously with push chair, albeit maybe incorrectly and probably both people of my generation. I was really just trying to convey that a pushchair was a device for carting young children around in.

19. Pelham @17. For what it’s worth, that’s how I parsed 29ac.

20. Hovis @19: Thank you for that.

21. Oh, it’s a stroller! And more unindicated rhyming slang for L25. Thanks all.

22. 14ac: SOED 2007 p 2282 dates the relevant meaning of pony as (first used in) late 18th century and marks it as slang, but none of my dictionaries describe it as rhyming slang.

23. I imagined it as coming from quarter = quarter horse = pony. Thank you for the information

24. Anil@16, if you’re still here: Games World of Puzzles (the idiotic title comes as the result of the tortured publishing history of the original Games Magazine) does four really high-quality American cryptics per issue. Sometimes more, but always at least four–two standard 15x15s, and two barred “variety” cryptics with added gimmicks. If you are willing to pace yourself rather than chewing through them in a single sitting (like me all too often, ahem), that’s almost one a week. Games Magazine (in its various iterations) is what got me into this hobby in the first place, by the way.

    Incidentally,

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