Guardian 26,257 by Rufus

52 comments on “Guardian 26,257 by Rufus”

1. 24
   I took this as almost passé (out of date)

2. Where’s the definition in ISLE?

3. Me too, Joseph

4. Thanks Rufus and manehi
   I enjoyed this one (apart from 10a, which I too don’t think really works – as mentioned above, where’s the definition?)
   I had PASSE too.
   Although they weren’t difficult, I particularly liked the clues for GOOSEBERRY, A SWELL and CENTAURS.
   PUPA and NEARED gave me a lot of trouble; the first because I was looking for a palindrome, the second because I took ages to read “aggravation” as an anagram indicator.

5. Joseph/Tim: thanks, edited. Edit: and muffin!

6. P.S. another “key” in 9a is Robert Key, the Kent and (ex) England “opener” (opening batsman). Not sure if Rufus was thinking of him, though.

7. 21d if you remove the hyphen from “self-conscious” you have a decent def. for “egoist”? Misdirection, perhaps?

8. Good time overall – thanks to Rufus and to manehi!

   Not happy with 10: as Tim Phillips says at @2, it seems to be missing a definition. While I could get it from the crosses and the “spelt without S in French” bit, I am not sure about the other wordplay suggestions given by manehi above. Although my French is VERY limited, I can’t think of a context in which “Le” would equal “it” – it would normally be “il” or “ce”, wouldn’t it, depending on the context? I tried checking whether there was an isle called Yes somewhere, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. 🙁

9. Abhay – “le” can mean “it” as a direct object – “Je le veux”=”I want it”. Again, I’m not convinced by the clue myself.

   Muffin at 7: thanks, that’s a clearer explanation of what I was trying to get at.

10. Thanks, manehi @9 – I stand corrected on that count. But we are still missing the definition!

11. Thanks manehi and Rufus. Agree with the above reservations over 10 ac – but Abhay, French LE can be translated as IT when it is an object of verb eg il le trouve = he finds it.

12. Grasping at straws here: there appears to be an island in Croatia called “Ist”. Could the fragment “it spelt without S” be doing double duty in our clue to provide this definition? (As I said, grasping at straws!)

    But then what is the “Yes” doing there? In *any* case, what *is* that “Yes” doing there?

13. Whoops! too slow in typing.

14. Thanks Rufus and manehi

    I had no problems at all with 10a. Rufus is simply asking do the French spell isle without the S … and then says Yes you do … ILE ! In fact, I thought that it was quite clever.

15. I, on the other hand, thought ISLE was wilfully obscure. Apart from that, a good Rufus.

16. Because, if that is the logic of the clue, then MAST is an equally correct answer. And probably a few more four-letter words where the French equivalent has a circumflex accent, but I can’t be arsed to go and find them.

17. Kathryn’s Dad @14: There are indeed many English words where the French equivalents are spelt by dropping an “s”, but I can’t think of anything other than ISLE that would fit the _S_E pattern created by the crossing words. The question (for me) is: absent the crosses, can one get the word from the standalone clue? That is where the (apparent) lack of a definition hurts.

18. Sorry – my previous comment was in response to Kathryn’s Dad @ 16 – not 14!

19. Hmm … just to make it clearer …
    He asks for it (the answer, as it turns out ISLE) has no S for the equivalent French word. By doing a word search with -S-E, I could find only four words – ASHE, ESNE, ESSE and ISLE. Only one of these will give the equivalent French word if the S is removed.

    Rufus has to be safe with this one, surely !

20. brucew@aus: There is no doubt that, once the crosses are in place, there is only one clear answer. In that sense, Rufus in indeed “safe”.

    My point is that the clue should be capable of a clear solution even if no crosses are available. That doesn’t work here, because there *are* other four-letter English words that lose an ‘s’ in the spelling of the equivalent French words.

    Incidentally, the place that throws up those four options for “_S_E” depends on user entries; the lists there are by no means exhaustive.

21. Not sure of this but is not IS the cas identification for Iceland which is an island.

22. Sorry should have put car not cas.

23. david – Is. is also short for Isle (Chambers). Maybe the clue could have been “Is it, in French, spelt without the S? Yes” – “Is” doubling as a direct def, and as IS (in this case, removed from the “French” indicator), plus LE=”it, in French”, and then the surface reference to ILE vs ISLE.

24. I wondered if there was a mistake in 10a – “Is spelt without the s in French? Yes” would work for me, with ‘is’ (standard abbreviation, defined as island in all dictionaries, I think) as a definition. I thought maybe an adjustment to the original clue had gone wrong. As it stands, the “is” seems somewhat – isolated? I love to see a definition at neither the beginning nor the end but I don’t think it quite comes off here. Otherwise, I suppose the non-def. parsing does just about work and the clue is (eventually) solvable that way.

    I sometimes find the last few clues in Rufus very hard and that’s what happened today – busybody, isle, gooseberry and neared all tripped/held me up. I was rather tired, but anyway I don’t expect Rufus to be especially easy. I think that’s a canard; he’s not one of the hardest and will always give us some easy ones but he also almost always has something unexpected and unique up his sleeve.

25. Maybe we should all just agree that ISLE was not one of Rufus’ finest …

26. I also thought that the clue for 10a was very weak, and that the puzzle was a fairly typical Rufus, with some good clues and some pretty poor efforts. Why should an orator be happy to give an address? She or he may hate the task. Coherent is only a loose synonym for logical.
    I found Nutmeg’s Quiptic puzzle today a little more challenging and a good deal more enjoyable, and, once again, felt that it could have been kept for a cryptic slot.

27. Actually KD there is already some disagreement so let me add to it. 10a is brilliant – just wasted on the matinée audience.

    Over time Rufus (in his many guises) has set some quite brilliant clues in his otherwise fairly easy puzzles – this is surely one for the hall of fame.

    I freely admit that it was my LOI and I prolly wouldn’t have got it in a month of Sundays without the crossers but once you do get it it has, to use Araucaria’s term (not sure if he actually coined it) layers. A PDM to relish.

28. A layer that seems to have been missed so far is that the French for “yes” is (yeah we all know oui) si – ie as a positive answer to a negative question.

    Si without the S gives I.

    I is a recognised abbreviation … anyone getting warm?

29. .. and of course it’s an &lit.

30. JollySwagman – thanks, that is a nice additional layer (I did think about the “is” without an ‘S’ gives I gives ISLE…). But the clue presumably needs more than two references to removing an S from/to get to a French word to lead us to ISLE, and I’m just not convinced by the wordplay – I think IS+LE was intended, but “In French” seems like it should also apply to the “is”. Anyway, I think it’s a weaker clue in a pretty decent Rufus.

31. Thanks Rufus, a pleasant Monday solve.

    Thanks manehi; ISLE makes more sense with is.=isle although, as you say, it really should be capitalised.

    JS@27, without any crossers I can’t get PDM! 😉

    GOOSEBERRY was my last one in (LOI) and was quite a nice cd. I also enjoyed WORKSHEETS, PUPA and COHERENT.

32. I thought the clue for ISLE was excellent, and I also thought the clue for PUPA was very good because of its palindromic misdirection. COUGAR was my LOI because I didn’t see the obvious anagram fodder until I had got the final checker from GOOSEBERRY, an answer that took me far too long to see.

33. Hi M

    I don’t say for a minute that this came to me straight away but the way I read it now is:

    One side (call it a def):

    In French is it spelt (without the S? Yes)

    Evaluating the bracket (under the influence of “in French”)

    Is it spelt (without the S, SI)
    Is it spelt I
    I meaning island

    —————————————————-

    The other side (call it the WP):

    In French is it spelt without the S? Yes

    IS [raw] LE (Fr for it)
    which obviously is splelt ILE in French

    Obviously it doesn’t work in a tickbox WP/def way but surely it’s all there.

    BTW – thanks for the blog

34. Thanks JollySwagman – for me, it’s just a shame that IS has to be [raw] and not also “In French”. I did like the intention (even without the ‘[S]I’->I[sle]) – maybe ‘nice idea, could have been done better’ sums up my feelings best – if the ‘def’ side is a little obscure, the wordplay should be spot on.

35. I see that. Dunno how else he could have avoided it.

    I think the expl is that you can talk about French words in an otherwise English sentence.

    Eg

    In French is “isle” spelt without the S?
    In French is “ile” spelt without the S?
    In French is “le” spelt without the S?

    etc.

    That’s the best I can do.

36. Of course I didn’t mention in my expl so far that:

    In French is “isle” spelt without the S?

    is obviously another (so for me the third) reading.

    So two tight ones and one that needs a tiny bit of help – I’m happy.

37. Thanks to manehi for the blog.

    14 held me up for a while. First I wanted to put ‘set’ in a river to get a city but found nothing. Then I tried ‘put’ with the same result Eventually I found LAID. 🙁

    On 16 I was again misled for a while – looking for a guard.

    On 24a I also looked for a palindrome but failed. Thanks to manehi for the explanation.

38. All fairly straightforward except that ISLE was too clever/obscure for me to see it, and ADELAIDE took a while to see…

    Thanks to manehi and Rufus

39. So JS@27, what does PDM stand for?

40. Loosen up, bloggers. I thought 10ac was brilliant and can’t understand all the huffing and puffing.

    Brucew@aus seems- to me, anyway – to have explained it very well

41. Wow, all that discussion on ISLE, which I got reasonably quickly then thought no more of it.

    GOOSEBERRY, on the other hand, was exactly the sort of cd which gives me Rufusian nightmares, even with all the checkers. So Robi @31 and Andy B @32 made me feel much better …

42. Thanks manehi and Rufus

    For me this was the toughest Rufus for some time – especially the N-E quarter.

    Despite the ingenious suggestions above, I still find it hard to make convincing sense of 10a. Bruce (of Occam?)’s somewhat simpler and therefore attractive solution seems to lack a definition unless one takes it to be ‘this English word is spelled without an ‘s’ in French’. The nearest I can get to anything more specific is to read it as ‘is’ + ‘le’ (‘it’ as object in French) = ‘isle’ minus ‘s’ = ‘ile’ (isle in French) but one has to twist the surface rather hard to get that.

43. Thanks all
    Abhay “absent the crosses, can one get the word from the standalone clue? That is where the (apparent) lack of a definition hurts.”; quite irrelevant, hence we call it a CROSSword!

    My only complaint is 2d where I entered ‘hide’ very early on and finished up struggling and failing to solve 7ac.

44. Still a better than normal Rufus. (As the last few have been)

    I’m still not convinced that 10A is a “great” clue though! In fact I’m probably still in the “it’s shit” camp. 🙂

    Thanks to manehi and Rufus

45. OK, I’ll do it myself, PDM=penny drop moment in case anyone out there is still wondering………

46. At the risk of being boring about ISLE…… if Rufus had wanted a simple clue that relied on crossers he could have just said: ‘In French it is spelt without the S.’ The fact that he has added ‘Yes’ leads me to believe that JS is right and yes=si, without the ‘s’=’i’=isle=definition. At least that parsing does lead to a definition…..

47. Quelle emotion!
    I think it is simply just like brucew@aus (#14) tells us.
    No need for further investigation.
    Brilliant clue for some, weak for others.
    Personally, I found it at least an adventurous one – needed some thinking.

    On the whole a typical Rufus, we thought.
    We liked the anagram of 23ac, the charade of 26ac and the neat surface of 22d.
    On the other hand, 21d was pretty weak and why in 12ac an ‘orator’ should be happy – don’t know.
    There was not much against this puzzle, except perhaps the anagram indicator in 8d (‘changer’) that doesn’t feel right.

48. oh what joy – a great treat of a crossword that i enjoyed immensely. thankyou rufus

49. @Robi #46 (and #45)

    Exactement.

50. @46
    I think the “Yes!” joke is more likely to be a play on “without” than part of JS’s cryptic-indication-giving-an-abbreviation-as-a-definition. We’re being told to write the French for island “without” (outside) the s, and also that the French for island is “without” (lacks) the s. This is possible whether you think ‘is.’ stands for island or agree with Bruce above that the clue doesn’t have a definition and is ok without one. JS’s explanation (the “def.” part at least – there’s no need for a new “WP” part as we all get the i(s)le thing) is conceivable but unlikely – most unlike Rufus’ normal style, and certainly wouldn’t make it one of his better clues, to put it mildly.

51. @Herb – You have just defined yet another reading – another layer – you haven’t defeated any of the other ones.

    What is “more likely” in the sense of what did the setter intend is not relevant. When a clue has many layers it is perfectly possible for one or more of them to be “happy accidents” – as artists would say.

52. Isle get me coat.

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