Alan Connor finds record-breaking rudeness and corporate evasion in his pick of the week's best – and most optimally leveraged – cryptic clues
The news in clues
When Nigel Farage responded to Ken Clarke's "clowns" comment by recalling the justice minister's work in saving the single currency, Clarke may have smiled ruefully at the clue in Monday's Times...
19ac Regret backingoldcurrency (4)
...for EURO. Meanwhile, Gordius showed that he has not forgotten about...
2d Saying"beef", say, can be supporting timber (8)
....that tasty bute in supermarkets' corned beef in his clue for the carpenter's stand, the SAWHORSE. (A "saw" as in a saying, particularly a hackneyed one, shares a background with communicative words such as "saga" and "say".)
Blue clues
Donk made a bold claim in Wednesday's Independent in his clue...
26ac Imay breakrecord for sauciness (3)
...for LIP, then backed it up in another of his across clues (all of which began "I may..."), with a lewd surface reading...
29ac I may roger gorgeous nurses from behind (7)
...as Donk claims for the nonce that he is called GREGORY. The bar is set.
Latter patter
The corporate jargon recently described by Steven Poole in these pages was the subject of a clue in Tuesday's Times:
7d Gethighafterhandlingsmallbull? (10-5)
The definition for MANAGEMENT-SPEAK was "bull", which I've tended to presume is a shortened form of a longer, ruder term. It turns out that the eight-letter word is probably of 20th-century vintage, though, with "bull" stretching back to the 17th; there are also French and Icelandic words "boul" and "bull" with similar senses, so there's no hint of smut in the clue.
My favourite piece of management speak was related by Rob Long in his KCRW show Martini Shot, when he had been chatting with a business-world pal who told him:
You know how in business everyone always uses that stupid Chinese quote, you know: the word for 'crisis' is the same as the word for 'opportunity'? Well in our company we're so into this Six Sigma stuff, we're so deep into the lingo, that the word 'opportunity' is actually a bad word.
I mean, it's supposed to be a good thing, right? But because we're not really allowed to tear down an idea, you know, we're encouraged to be solutions-based, people have just decided to use that word in another way. So in meetings they'll say after a presentation, 'Um, I'm sensing there are a lot of opportunities here', and they won't mean 'opportunities', they'll mean, 'let's not do this, let's do whatever we can to avoid any "opportunities"', and sometimes a meeting will be called to 'address' 'opportunities' in a certain plan and by 'address' they mean 'kill'. And what's worse, my friend said, is that nobody thinks this is funny.
The other reason to beware "opportunities" in a corporate context is that "opportunities" are what you may be invited to pursue outside your workplace when you're no longer welcome there. You know, when your employer has decided that fewer stakeholders will be wearing more hats as they reallocate human resources.
It would liven up The Apprentice if one week it ended with Lord Sugar pointing and announcing "You're reduced" or similar. In that vein is this week's clueing challenge: reader, how would you clue RIGHTSIZING?
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for GEEK CHIC. The two-word phrase lent itself to some impressively terse clues, among them jonemm's "Smarty pants?"; andyknott's "iTie?"; TKHawkey's "Anorak's anorak?" and wellywearer2's "Square wear".
The runners-up are JollySwagman's indirect use of a Greek chick in "Cleopatra lost two kings. Looks freaky!" and yungylek's intriguing surface "Having given electric company bad check, I look like a dweeb"; the winner is the bleeding-edge imagery of ID5180378's "Start with Google eyeglasses. Everyone knows computer hardware is cool!". Kudos to '518 – please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the week
An apparently financial tale from Elgar in the Telegraph Toughie...
11/12ac What may hold up topsolver's headingstraightatPEP, unfortunately (9,5)
...turned out to be two routes to a SPAGHETTI STRAP. Delizioso!