Guardian 27,179 / Rufus

39 comments on “Guardian 27,179 / Rufus”

1. Sorry, I have to dash out now – I’ll respond to any queries when I get back.

2. Thanks Rufus and Eileen

   I found this rather irritating. Even with quite a lot of crossers, 1a could still have been PRESERVATIONIST. RATIO – why “in a maths class”? Why does a diver have to “come up to scratch”? (I didn’t help myself on this one by reading “driver” to start with!) “Contemplating” comes before INTENDING, and may not result in the latter. Why is OCH “impatient”? Most Scots I’ve heard use it as hesitation (like “er” or “um”). I took “of” as the inadequate anagram indicator for AWL. Why is ST “small road”?

   I did like UNDERWEAR.

3. Pretty standard Rufus fare. It did take me a while to see CONSERVATIONIST, and had I not already entered UNDERWEAR I might have been tempted by LET SLIP…

   Thanks to Rufus and Eileen

4. I did have LET SLIP to start with, but having SLIP in a solution that crossed with a clue containing “slip” would have been less than ideal.

5. I’m another who put in LET SLIP and hence was completely befuddled by U_D_L in the UNDERWEAR solution. Aaargh! I liked OARSMAN and COME UP TO SCRATCH. Thanks to Rufus and Eileen.

6. A pleasant if relatively undemanding challenge which appears to be typical of a Monday. Like others my progress was delayed by solving 23D as LET SLIP but this was a temporary blip. I accept Muffin’s issues regarding INTENDING but as an Anglo Scot I was happy enough with OCH. Thanks to Rufus and Eileen.

7. Thank you Rufus and Eileen.

   I did not have a problem with 1a, there seems to be a subtle difference between a CONSERVATIONIST and a ‘preservationist’:
   for the former the COED gives “a supporter or advocate of environmental conservation”.
   for the latter “a supporter or advocate of preservation, esp. of antiquities and historic buildings”.

   I don’t think that I knew the meaning of a RATIO until I studied maths, I wonder how muffin did?.

   I guess a diver cannot scratch easily through a wet suit.

8. Unlike Eileen I didn’t solve the long border clues until late in the piece as I needed crossers to be sure of the answers. Im also another who bunged in LET SLIP before realising my error. But all in all it was a pretty gentle and pleasant solve. My only grumble was with RETICLE where I had to use a word search, having never seen the word before and with the cryptic definition providing no indication of what the missing letters were in R.T.C.E.

9. Thanks Eileen and Rufus.

   Another Monday, another Rufus and another grumpy Muffin! The Diver was irritated thats why he was scratching – he must have read your post Muffin.

10. Hammer @9
    Why did he have to surface first, though?

11. Muffin @10

    Water is a lubricant, scratching underwater would be pretty ineffective.

12. Thanks Rufus and Eileen.

    An uncharacteristic but welcome grid. I’m not sure 30 is a kosher expression – it’s usually ‘hang,’ rather than hangs, I think.

    RETICLE is familiar to anyone who looks down a microscope.

    I liked ABRIDGE, UNDERWEAR and TOPKNOT among others.

13. Thanks, everyone.

    muffin @2 -I never even thought of PRESERVATIONIST: ‘green’ surely indicates CONservation.

    And, having been married to a Scot for over twenty years, I don’t think I ever heard OCH expressing hesitation – it was always impatience or irritation, usually pronounced more like ‘OCCCHHH!!’ 😉

14. I liked 1d which made 1a what it was.But RETICLE was iffy.

15. Agree about 26ac, RETICLE is more of an Azed word than a Rufus one. Before getting ABRIDGE, clearly correct, I had written in AUTOCUE, for which ‘line of sight’ is quite a witty clue…

16. Like Robinson @12, I felt that HANGS rather than HANG at 30a is unlikely to be idiomatic. RETICLE was a new word to me too, so a bit unfair to have as a cd. I seem to be in the majority with LET SLIP initially. The diminutive racing machines are widely known as GO-KARTS. What is a nil-draw, asks this football fan who saw his umpteenth nil-nil draw on Saturday.

    It’s all a matter of taste I guess. My apologies to all those for whom Rufus is a highlight of the week, he’s just not for me.

17. Thanks to Rufus and Eileen. I was not tempted by PreSERVATIONIST, but did start with LET SLIP and was not familiar with RETICLE (rejected by my spell-checker) and hangs in HANGS THE EXPENSE. I got OCH and THROUGH without fully understanding why. A typical Monday with Rufus except for the four long answers..

18. Thanks Eileen. I only knew OCH from OCH AWAY THE NOO, where I don’t think it indicates any hesitation, or even much irritation or impatience. I don’t see the clue as being cryptic, and would not think it out of place in a general knowledge crossword. However, not knowing much about Scottish vernacular, I expect others are wiser or better informed.

19. Apart from pausing briefly to check 26ac in a dictionary (I am more familiar with the alternative spelling ‘reticule’) I found this a totally straightforward Rufus.

20. Thanks Eileen. I was another LET SLIPper, until the UNDERWEAR revealed itself.

    I see that this blog is currently the only result if you search Google for “hangs the expense” (in quotes), which would seem to confirm that it’s not an idiomatic phrase: the usual “hang the expense” is an imperative (“let the expense be hanged”), not a thing that people do.

21. Quite right, Andrew @20. I was not at all happy with this clue and I don’t really think it’s a double definition, as I labelled it, since ‘suspends the outlay’ doesn’t really make sense. I think we have to split it up, for wordplay: suspends [hangs] + outlay [expense] rather than a definition.

22. Well i thought this was a disappointing Rufus – normally I find him amusing. Somehow very flat, I thought.

23. For 9ac you have ‘Anagram [perhaps] of A COOL MP’. Surely the ‘or’ has to be included in the anagram for it to work?

24. Thank you Rufus and Eileen. I always find Rufus a witty introduction to the week, even if some of the clues are barely cryptic. I particularly liked 6dn as a former oarsman (my expression was usually agonised rather than stern), and the itchy diver made me smile.

    As someone brought up in Scotland, I have always thought of “och” as a general fill in word, somewhere between “Oh” and a sigh, and sometimes as a sort of assent to indicate you are listening to or agreeing with your interlocutor. Magor @18: as far as I am aware “Och aye the noo” is only every uttered by fictional Scots people, especially in cartoons.

25. Thank you, Peter Flint @23 – corrected now.

26. Thanks both,
    17 was very clever. The problem with ‘hangs the expense’ is that in its usual form ‘hang’ is imperative, while ‘hangs’ isn’t.

27. I was a LET SLIP-er initially, and another who paused over HANGS in 30ac but,overall I quite liked this. I had to check the meaning of RETICLE but otherwise no difficulties.
    Thanks Rufus.

28. Pleasant Rufus — I got all but RETICLE last night.

    muffin@10 See Cookie@7 — the diver has to take off her wet suit first.

    Thanks, Rufus and Eileen.

29. Valentine @28
    ..but the clue doesn’t say anything about taking off a wet suit; and besides, divers don’t necessarily wear one 🙂

30. I still don’t understand how 16d is a cryptic definition. It reads as a straightforward, non-cryptic definition (regardless of whether it is defined accurately)

31. SLIP rather than DROP at first from me too, and UNDERWEAR was my favourite clue both for its surface and corrective crosser. As they were all gettable I wasn’t worried by the looseness of some clues – which probably explains my habit of banging in wrong answers having not fully parsed things. I had heard of RETICLE (or CULE) somewhere and presumed it was the same root as RETINA. Thanks for once again finding the positive Eileen and to Rufus for a gentle start to the week.

32. Hi Whiteking @31
    I knew the alternative ‘reticule’, too – but as a small handbag – from the Latin reticulum, a diminutive of reta, a net [hence the ‘network’ in the definition]: retina is, ‘apparently’, says Chambers, also derived from ‘reta’.

33. Thanks to Eileen and Rufus. In my opinion this was an enjoyable puzzle for those of us who are the beginner’s end of the spectrum. I thought that a couple of clues, 1down and 20 across, were quite witty.

34. Eileen, have you got the number right? Mine says 27,179

35. Muffin @ 2 ST is ‘short’ for STREET (not sure if anyone has answered this yet)

    Reticles are also found in telescopic sights – they are the cross hairs

36. Thank you, Barrie @34 – I have corrected the number.

37. St = an abbreviation for street, hence small

38. Yes, reticle is a ‘sight’ with ‘lines’ on it. I too thought autocue.

39. Just found my scribbled notes. I was unable to parse 24a, 25a and 21d, and was not sure about 16d either.

    RETICLE was a new word for me.

    Thanks Rufus and blogger.

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