Guardian 26,969 / Rufus

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Here’s Rufus, with an entetaining medley of double and cryptic definitions and some neat anagrams, with lovely surfaces, as ever, to launch us into the week.

Thanks, Rufus – I enjoyed it.

Across

9 Gave out rapidly, as the drunk did? (6,3)
REELED OFF
Double definition

10 Subject those people to the ultimate in abuse (5)
THEME
THEM [those people] + [abus]E

11 Related company takes on new agent (7)
COGNATE
CO [company] + an anagram [new] of AGENT

12 Joint league champ­ions? (7)
TOPSIDE
TOP SIDE

13 Hesitantly stated a colour and was wrong (5)
ERRED
ER [hesitantly stated?] + RED [colour]

14 After direction, City Hall works as it should! (9)
ETHICALLY
E [East – direction] + an anagram [works] of CITY HALL

16 Breakdown in deliveries? (7,8)
BOWLING ANALYSIS
Cryptic definition

19 Doctor, get up and heal this deathly disease (3,6)
THE PLAGUE
Anagram [doctor] of GET UP and HEAL

21 Get involved in someone else’s business? (5)
MERGE
Cryptic definition

22 Organised miracle rescue (7)
RECLAIM
Anagram [organised] of MIRACLE

23 Worried, hastened to receive religious instruction (7)
HARRIED
HARED [hastened] round RI [Religious Instruction]

24 Leave word for the French (5)
ADIEU
Cryptic definition

25 Must it end in tragedy following extraordinary scenes? (9)
NECESSITY
IT + [traged]Y after an anagram [extraordinary] of SCENES – not quite sure of the definition  [Edit: thanks to Roger @1: ‘must’ is a noun]

Down

1 Sports club (7,3)
CRICKET BAT
Cryptic definition

2 Sit on the fence with dispute between neighbours, perhaps (8)
HEDGEROW
HEDGE [sit on the  fence] + ROW [dispute]

3 Consider changing gear on the way (6)
REGARD
Anagram [changing] of GEAR on RD [road  – way]

4 It used to be very painful (4)
SORE
Double definition: SORE used to mean ‘very’: the only place I have met it is in the King James Bible account of the Nativity: ‘And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.’ – my favourite clue

5 An ample opportunity? Not a bit of it! (1,3,6)
A FAT CHANCE
Cryptic definition

6 I play-act, badly out of character (8)
ATYPICAL
Anagram [badly] of I PLAY-ACT

7 Servant in upset during dinner, perhaps (6)
MENIAL
Reversal [upset] of IN in MEAL [dinner, perhaps]

8 Fair to put the head in charge (4)
FETE
T[he] in FEE [charge]

14 Date of a battle? (10)
ENGAGEMENT
Double definition

15 Yeasty reds drunk in recent times (10)
YESTERDAYS
Anagram [drunk] of YEASTY REDS

17 Sharing common interests — like football clubs? (2,6)
IN LEAGUE
Double definition

18 Island doctor turns up to be imprisoned in Asia, unexpectedly (8)
SARDINIA
A reversal [turns up] of DR [doctor] in an anagram [unexpectedly] of IN ASIA – ‘in’ is doing double duty

20 Il Duce turned out to be a mathematician (6)
EUCLID
Anagram [turned out to be] of IL DUCE

21 Doctor got up and down (6)
MOROSE
MO [doctor] ROSE [got up]  [I smiled at the doctor’s response to the instruction in 19ac]

22 See what has been written about publicity (4)
READ
RE [about] AD [publicity]

23 Even a dull writer may deliver a kick (4)
HACK
Double definition

43 comments on “Guardian 26,969 / Rufus”

  1. Thank you, Rufus and Eileen. I also thought SORE was satisfyingly neat.
    Eileen – in 25, you’ve accidentally included ‘it’ in the definition. I think MUST here is a noun, as in ‘It’s a must’.

  2. Thanks, Roger – it wasn’t ‘accidentally’: I wasn’t seeing ‘must’ as a noun. [I said I wasn’t sure about the definition. 😉 ]

  3. Couldn’t think of the old meaning of SORE (and I like the clue now that it’s explained), but a straightforward Rufus as ever. Thanks to him and to Eileen.

  4. Thanks for blogging, Eileen.

    Lovely puzzle in the usual Rufus style. Lots of excellent surfaces, and all concise. The Bible is the only place that I’ve come across SORE as well. Although it’s archaic, it is of course cognate with the German SEHR.

    Sehr gut, Rufus, und vielen Dank.

  5. Thanks Rufus and Eileen. Nice gentle start to the week.
    (Picture quiz in the quiptic blog, if anyone is interested)

  6. Thank you Rufus for a good start to the week and Eileen for the blog, especially for the explanation of SORE in its archaic sense, the Bible quote did not come to my mind, all I could think of was “sore need”.

  7. Worth checking Shakespeare and contemporaries for any use of SORE = very, as they would have had roughly the same lexicon as James I’s translators.

    Nicely written, NECESSITY my favourite among a few, and good opportunities for beginner solvers with a clutch of fairly-obvious anagrams.

  8. Good morning. Just landed here desperate for hints on parsing Saturday’s Paul. Heigh ho. But as I’m here – can someone explain ‘surface’ please?

  9. The surface of a cryptic clue is its literal meaning, just by reading the clue – which would of course be totally different from the intended answer.

  11. Hi Rural Felicity – and welcome, if you haven’t commented before!

    I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for hints on Paul: Prize puzzles are blogged the following Saturday, after the deadline for entries.

  12. Rural Felicity: you won’t get any help here with Paul’s prize crossword until after the deadline for submission of entries.

  13. Thanks all, yes I gathered that, fair enough. I’ve finished it (I think), but am mighty dissatisfied.

  14. This was enjoyable. I agree that SORE was good. The SOED gives an example from Byron: “A shameless wight, sore given to revel and ungodly glee.”

    I would guess that EUCLID as an anagram of Il Duce has been done before, but I don’t remember it and thought it was good.

    A minor quibble: I’m not convinced that “sharing common interests” is really a definition of IN LEAGUE, which suggests positively acting in concert.

  15. Thanks Eileen for your elegant blog, as ever. I enjoyed this too, and I do appreciate the “slightly easier on my brain” advent of Mondays, when I usually have a do-able Rufus experience.

  16. P.S. Like you, Eileen, I appreciated “sore” very much. I have just finished teaching the two versions of the infancy narratives (Luke and Matthew) to my 16 year old Study of Religion students in the process of examining sacred texts of the Hebrews and Christians (exegetes that we are!). They found “sore afraid” a difficult concept!
    I have really valued some of the other “sore” references. I did not know the Byronic one (thanks, JimS@14), and the reference to Shakespeare also rings vague bells (Trailman@7).

  18. Enjoyed this. Thanks Rufus and Eileen. Just one query (or maybe nitpick) – in 16a, wouldn’t an analysis be a breakdown of rather than in?

  19. Had fun with this. Didn’t think of SORE=very, so I was sore dissatisfied with that clue until I came here. Thanks—now I quite like it. And, of course, BOWLING ANALYSIS needed a few more crossing letters for me than it might have for people from the cricket-playing world.

    Eileen, looks like you raised a slight eyebrow at 13 across. It works better if you read the wordplay as a single unit: “Hesitantly stated a color” = “Er—Red?”

  22. Thanks to Rufus and Eileen. I struggled a bit with HARRIED because I was trying to use “hied” rather than “hared” and like mrpenney did not know BOWLING ANALYSIS (and also TOP SIDE), but everything did emerge quickly. Lots of fun.

    According to the concordance, Shakespeare makes plentiful use of all the meanings of SORE. For an equivalent to “very” he links it three times to “sick”: “one sore sick that hears the passing bell” (Venus and Adonis) and King John and Henry IV as “sore sick.”

  24. I think sore=very was familiar from a folk song but I can’t remember which one. Found this one at the trickier end of Rufus’s range, but they are all clear enough in retrospect, except that I wasn’t entirely convinced by MERGE, which was last in

    Thanks to Rufus and Eileen

  25. Like BH, I thought this trickier than usual for Rufus. I guessed both SORE and BOWLING ANALYSIS and I spent rather longer than usual in completing this. Anyway,a reasonable start to the week.
    Thanks Rufus.

  26. Well chaps and chapesses, before any of you run away with the idea that you don’t live in the cricket world you should first check around. There are plenty of sites which go into detail, but the quickest check is to see if you are mentioned in this list http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Countries/ There are a few other countries that don’t make the list due to administrative problems in those countries.

  28. The full OED offers:-

    Bible: 1 Sam. xxviii. 15 “Saul answered, I am sore distressed.”

    As well as a slew of other meaning which aren’t quite cognate with ‘very’.

    Plus, George Eliot, ‘Mill on the Floss’, II. iii. ix. 138 ‘She was sore fond of us children’.

    The MED has lots of examples of the use as an ‘intensifier’, which sounds similar…

  29. Straightforward once I realised that the breakdown in deliveries was not morning sickness! With thanks to Rufus and Eileen.

  31. Tough for a Monday but entertaining. I never would have understood 4.

    To beery hiker – dredging my memory it might be used in John Martyn’s Spencer the Rover. But I’m probably wrong as I can’t find the cd.

  32. It doesn’t appear in the version of “Spencer’ that I know (Copper Family’s). I’m still thinking – only thing I’ve come up with so far is the Queen of Hearts nursery rhyme “he beat the knave full sore”.

  33. Apologies for the double post, but I just remembered one. The Prickle-eye bush, pricks my heart full sore…

  34. Steve @31: no I don’t think so, though it wouldn’t feel out of place in that song. (The best concert I ever went to was John Martyn at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975, and Spencer the Rover was the highlight of the evening.)

    Just a further thought about “sore” in the antiquated sense. Does it always mean “very” in a bad way? That is, you could be sore afraid, but I doubt you could be sore happy.

  36. 4dn brought to mind ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ – ‘Though with a scornful wonder Men see her sore oppressed …’. A very satisfying clue indeed.

  37. As usual, Rufus provided a nice start to the week. Since my personal world is not a cricket-playing (or watching), even though I am English, 16a took some thought. BOWLING was an obvious possibility, but ANALYSIS was a long time coming even with the crossers. My favourite was THE PLAGUE.

    Thanks, Rufus and Eileen.

  39. Steve @31 – you may be right (and I’m envious – I only saw John Martyn once very late in his career), but I think there was also one Shirley Collins did that rhymed “no excuse” with “sore abuse”, possibly One night as I lay on my bed…

  40. I’d never heard of bowling analysis, but it doesn’t surprise me that cricket is beset with the same sort of obsessive statistifying as baseball. (“He’s stolen third base in the fifth inning more often than any other right fielder in the Western Division of the National League.”)

    On the other hand, though I’d never heard of John Martyn, I’ve known Spencer the Rover for years. I googled it and John Martyn, and “sore” isn’t in his or the Copper Family’s lyrics. You might like to know of an obscure version of Spencer that scholars have found in New York. It begins:

    These words were composed by Spencer the Rover
    Who travelled great Brooklyn and most parts of Queens.
    He’d been so verblunget
    — Which means great confusion,
    In case you shouldn’t know what “verblunget” means.

    The meat meaning topside was also new to me. Apparently over here we call it “round,” but I really don’t know from cuts of meat anyway.

    Probably nobody will read this, since I didn’t discover Monday’s blog till Friday.

    Thanks, Rufus and Eileen.

  42. Thanks Eileen and Rufus.

    We know Rufus enjoys cricket as well as sailing so no surprises here.

    Some of the usual frustrations with double and cryptic definitions but also some real gems – NECESSITY was top class and Hedgerow (though relatively simple) is brilliantly constructed with the components and the surface in harmony.

  43. Thanks Rufus and Eileen

    Was right on his wavelength with this one and it was over pretty quickly – but it was one of his puzzles that made you still feel good doing it. Easy but entertaining !!!

    Like others, I had to follow up that definition of SORE – he can drag out a word and find a very uncommon definition to it from time to time.

    Finished in the SE corner, following the natural direction of the filled in answers.

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