Comments on: Guardian 24,654 / Rufus

By: smutchin

smutchin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:09:53 +0000

Eileen – sorry to alarm you. I was amused by the idea of mixing up termagant and ptarmigan, that’s all. And it’s unfortunate that I was taking a mouthful of coffee at the moment I read your comment!

By: GHD

GHD — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:44:47 +0000

Monica, Andrew

The weird characters in the online version come from the source code representations of the ‘ and – characters ie:-

16 down %u2019 = the Unicode for single right quote ‘
22 down %u2014 = the Unicode for the em-dash -

Try “Googling” %u2014 and you’ll see what I mean.

By: Brian Harris

Brian Harris — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:23:54 +0000

Not really impressed at all today. Too many poor clues, and a number of what appeared to be mistakes (eg ABATTOIR without enough letters in the surface).

Plymouth? Would never have connected Rock with a bird of fowl of which I’ve never heard even if I spent the next million years trying to solve this puzzle. Didn’t get 1ac either, but was convinced for a while the solution was COTTAGER.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:55:51 +0000

Smutchin, I can’t understand such a violent reaction – I only really meant I had to think for a moment whether ‘termagant has ‘i’ or ‘a’ in the middle!

Dave E: all my dictionaries say that ‘initial’ means the first letter of a word, so I don’t see that it matters really whether it’s ‘butcher’ or ‘butchers’.

By: Dave Ellison

Dave Ellison — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:07:16 +0000

Eileen #20. Yes I am saying ‘butchers initially’ would suggest ‘BB’ [cf pp = pages]. I am also saying, as far the surface reading went, butcher would suffice, so no need for butchers.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:05:49 +0000

Eileen – your termagant/ptarmigan comment made me blow coffee out of my nose.

Monica – on second thoughts, I misread what you wrote about 11d, so it’s not quite how I understood it. I like your way of thinking, but not sure it works.

Derek – remember that there are no true synonyms, for that would imply redundancy. Esoteric=secret is close enough for crossword purposes, just as boxing ring=arena and tabulate=catalogue are close enough, but none of those words have precisely equivalent meanings.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:16:14 +0000

Jimbo, I’ve looked at this again and think you may after all be talking about the first definition ‘kept quiet’: here, the verb is definitely lay [past tense of lie] rather than ‘laid’ [past tense of 'lay] so still perfectly [sic!] OK

By: Derek Lazenby

Derek Lazenby — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:11:16 +0000

Either

1) we were too busy with the others or
2) we were waiting to see who’s nerve broke first or
3) we forgot or
4) we missed it

I was not on 4), so yes quite right it needed saying.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:11:05 +0000

JimboNWUK: the alarm bells always ring with me when I see lie / lay. Here, the secondary meaning of ‘lay low’ is ‘defeat’ in the present tense – so perectly OK!

By: JimboNWUK

JimboNWUK — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:45:07 +0000

I am amazed no-one has complained about the use of the tense in 2D — “Kept Low” translated to the answer should be “LAID low” not LAY…. and I agree 11D was cruddy.