The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/27532.
I seem to have hit the cycle of Vulcan’s Monday puzzles. Vulcan (to avoid the setter’s unknown gender) seems to be aiming at a Rufus successor, with the plethora of Cryptic and Double definitions (and some simple but very effective clues). As such, the puzzles fit well into the Monday slot, so I can expect more pleasant encounters.
| Across | ||
| 1 | ENLIST | Join forces (6) |
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 4 | OFFHAND | Ungracious, leaving to applause (7) |
| A charade of OFF (‘leaving’) plus HAND (‘applause’). | ||
| 9 | PARAMOUNT | Vital soldier dropped next to horse (9) |
| A charade of PARA (trooper, ‘soldier’) plus MOUNT (‘horse’). | ||
| 10 | WAFER | Biscuit produced in a mass (5) |
| Double definition, the second referring to the church service. | ||
| 11 | SCAMP | Rascal has power to end fraud (5) |
| A charade of SCAM (‘fraud’) plus P (‘power’). | ||
| 12 | RING ROUND | Make several calls for jewellery — its shape? (4,5) |
| A charade of RING (‘jewellery’) plus ROUND (‘Its shape’ – i.e. the ring’s). | ||
| 13 | DOGWOOD | Who might bark up this tree, do we hear? (7) |
| Sounds like (‘do we hear’) DOG WOULD (the answer to ‘who might bark?’). A branch of a dogwood tree in flower. |
||
| 15 | SHRANK | Got less quiet, leading to row (6) |
| A charade of SH (‘quiet’!) plus RANK (‘row’). | ||
| 17 | TWEETS | They are heard in the garden, or seen on the phone (6) |
| Double definition, the second referring to the Twitter app on a smartphone. | ||
| 19 | SQUEERS | Cruel schoolmaster odd to find aboard ship (7) |
| An envelope (‘to find aboard’) of QUEER (‘odd’) in SS (steam ‘ship’). The definition refers to Wackford SQUEERS, the schoolmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickelby, by DIckens. | ||
| 22 | INTEGRATE | Mix in, where fire is lit? Not hard (9) |
| IN T[h]E GRATE (‘where fire is lit?’) minus the H (‘not hard’). | ||
| 24 | DEFER | Put off having criminal freed (5) |
| An anagram (‘criminal’) of ‘freed’. | ||
| 26 | SCOFF | Mock fast food? (5) |
| Double definition. | ||
| 27 | POKER FACE | Zero reading from this dial (5,4) |
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 28 | LATERAL | Afterwards, almost everyone sort of thinking (7) |
| A charade of LATER (‘afterwards’) plus AL[l] (‘everyone’) minus its last letter (‘almost’). | ||
| 29 | UPBEAT | Confident gesture from conductor (6) |
| Double definition. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | EXPOSED | Wife once modelled naked (7) |
| A charade of EX (‘wife once’) plus POSED (‘modelled’). Neat. | ||
| 2 | LARVA | Very young peacock (5) |
| Cryptic definition. Aglais io, the peacock butterfly. |
||
| 3 | SEMAPHORE | This flags up important messages (9) |
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 4 | OUTINGS | Trips that reveal our preferences? (7) |
| Double definition, the second being an allusion to e.g. the disclosure of someone else’s sexuality. | ||
| 5 | FEWER | Not so many following sheep, right? (5) |
| A charade of F (‘following’) plus EWE (‘sheep’) plus R (‘right’). | ||
| 6 | AFFLUENCE | Being well off, a criminal suppresses illness (9) |
| An envelope (‘suppresses’) of FLU (‘illness’) in ‘a’ plus FENCE (‘criminal’). | ||
| 7 | DERIDE | Scorn some madder idea (6) |
| A hidden answer (‘some’) in ‘madDER IDEa’. | ||
| 8 | PUTRID | Place cleared, but rotting (6) |
| A charade of PUT (‘place’) plus RID (‘cleared’). | ||
| 14 | GO WITHOUT | Be deprived of two — I ought to struggle (2,7) |
| An anagram (‘to struggle’) of ‘two I ought’ | ||
| 16 | ROUND TRIP | Circumnavigation? (5,4) |
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 18 | SCALPEL | One opening in the theatre (7) |
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 19 | SHEIKH | Arab chief‘s tremor when speaking (6) |
| Sounds like (‘when speaking’) SHAKE (‘tremor’). | ||
| 20 | SERPENT | Creeper makes weird present (7) |
| An anagram (‘makes weird’) of ‘present’. | ||
| 21 | DIESEL | In Leeds I replaced fuel (6) |
| An anagram (‘replaced’) of ‘Leeds I’. ‘In’ is there just for the surface. | ||
| 23 | GO FAR | Have great success as explorer? (2,3) |
| Definition and literal interpretation. | ||
| 25 | FLAKE | A little snow beginning to freeze body of water (5) |
| A charade of F (‘beginning to Freeze’) plus LAKE (‘body of water’). | ||
I could not parse 10a (never thought of a religious connection) or 2d (never heard of peacock butterfly).
My favourites were 15a, 13a.
New for me was SCOFF = fast food.
Thanks Peter and Vulcan.
Thanks PeterO and Vulcan.
Quite straightforward – a bit too much so for my liking, but tastes differ.
9a: PARA is surely ‘soldier dropped’ (by parachute)? One of the best clues.
18d: I had SURGEON at first, which caused a slight delay.
19d: SHEIKS also just about works and is what I had before my final ‘Check all’, assuming an alternative spelling of SHEIKH. But the correct answer is better.
Thakns Vulcan and PeterO
Yes, very Rufusian. I liked PARAMOUNT and ENLIST – both late ones in.
Wouldn’t 10 have read better as “Mass-produced biscuit?”?
Ouch!
Michelle @ 1: SCOFF actually means to eat quickly, hence fast food.
Thanks PeterO, an enjoyable Monday challenge: Rufusian as muffin @3 said, with a bit of added bite – eg, I had ‘SPOOF’ meaning ‘mock’ which also fitted the crossers at 26, and LARVA cleverly gave me pause, though after all these years, I’m just about learning to remember that ‘theatre’ (as at 18) can mean the operating type too. Thanks Vulcan – all very logical!
Rufus Redux.
ENLIST – a typical definition just about cryptic.
4ac (reveal our preferences) does not quite work for me!
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO
I like Vulcan’s style – some very smooth surfaces. Favourites were PUTRID, AFFLUENCE and INTEGRATE. Many thanks to V & P.
There were some good double definitions here which I enjoyed, such as POKER FACE 27a and SCALPEL 18d (the latter as mentioned by Bullhassocks@6). However, I did have question marks against 1a ENLIST (with you Dave Ellision@7 on that one) and 16d ROUND TRIP as barely cryptic. 6d AFFLUENCE seemed the wrong part of speech but the adjective “affluent” was too short to fit the space. Like beaulieu@3, I thought 19d was SHEIKS, but the plural looked just wrong – and I didn’t think Vulcan meant ‘s, so I though of an old play on words vaguely remembered, “SHEIKH Djibouti”.
It was good to solve this without resorting to any reference sources, despite the temptation to google the young of a peacock to get my LOI, 2d LARVA, so I was chuffed when my guess proved correct.
Thanks, Vulcan and PeterO.
Just looking at google just now I don’t actually know how I got 19d SHEIKH, as the pun I recalled was from a Frank Zappa album title from the 70s, “Sheik Yerbouti”…
Shouldn’t 2d include a “for example” indicator. Not all larvae become peacock butterflies.
I agree with Julie@10 re 6d, “affluence”. I suppose if we read it as the state of being well off it works, just…..?
Rufus 2.0
I liked the ‘dropped’ soldier – quite clever.
NNI@11: True, but all peacock butterflies are larvae when young, so I think it works.
I, too, liked the ‘dropped’ soldier!
After a brief holiday in Sicily; nobody has yet commented on 2x ROUND in 12 and 16. Is this good style?
Thank you to Vulcan and PeterO.
27a How do you make Lady Gaga cry? (5,4)
What the Dickens! Just couldn’t solve 19ac, therefore LOI…
Oh dear. Just as I was settling in to enjoying Monday Guardians again …
On reading 1a, my thoughts were 1) half the clue has been omitted, 2) Rufus has come back out of retirement, and 3) this is not going to be worth my time. In the end, I gave it five minutes, and nothing else was as bad as 1a, though a few came close.
Please, please, editor if you’re reading, can we have a normal cryptic on Mondays? I don’t mind if it’s easy. Developing solvers need something approachable, but I don’t see how lazy clueing will really help them develop.
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO. Not quite on Vulcan’s wavelength just yet, therefore slower than it should have been. That said all relatively straightforward in the end, but could not parse wafer. I liked outings and thanks again to Vulcan and PeterO.
Ian SW3: totally the opposite of my reaction. A really nice Monday puzzle I thought. I quite liked ENLIST. And AFFLUENCE is fine: we aspire to affluence / we aspire to being well off.
I particularly liked 20d.
Ian SW3 – out of bed wrong side this morning? I thought easy but fun, and especially liked DOGWOOD and the dropped soldier. Now for the gardening. Thanks Vulcan and Peter O
Thanks PeterO and Vulcan.
Can’t see how this can be described as lazy clueing – the surfaces are coherent and there is a nice range of devices used. To each their own, I suppose, but if this is lazy then Rufus was lazy and I was always a fan. Favourites were POKER FACE, TWEETS and PARAMOUNT.
I hadn’t tried Vulcan before so I thought I’d have a go. Not my favourite type of puzzle but still good in its way. I’m glad the editor continues to include a wide variety of styles as it would be very dull to get only only one sort, easy or not. Thank you Vulcan, PerterO and the editor: please keep up the good work!
I agree with the general consensus that this was an entertaining Monday puzzle, worthy of Rufusian status. Thanks.
Martin @17: there are two ‘GO’s for that matter as well (at 14 and 23).
I generally agree that having something a bit different on a Monday is a welcome change of pace and enjoyed the bulk of this, but wasn’t 100% convinced by all of it. LARVA felt a little unfair to me and at the other end of the spectrum the cryptic element of ENLIST/ROUND TRIP was 10a thin (as Julie has already said). WAFER, EXPOSED and PARAMOUNT all raised a smile, though.
Yes, this was nice enough and very easy. I guessed LARVA, having forgotten the butterfly, but I thought this the weakest clue. I liked a lot of the others though and the puzzle did bring back memories of Rufus.
Thanks Vulcan.
I struggled to get going for 10 minutes but then wham! It all fell in to place. Which was a lovely feeling for someone who is just learning the ropes. Some elegant clues as well. But I doubted myself on ENLIST and ROUND TRIP as they seemed too… straightforward? Anyway, I’m not complaining; it’s nice not to feel like a dimbulb for once!
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO for a fun start to the week.
I noted the blogger’s observation about the plethora of CDs and DDs in this crossword (of which I counted 7 and 5 respectively), but there were also 10 clues constructed as simple two-part charades, starting with OFFHAND and PARAMOUNT. They were quite classy, though, and I enjoyed solving this crossword, which was not a write-in for me.
I had just one query, and I think I’m the first to raise this: shouldn’t 13a DOGWOOD start with ‘What’ rather than ‘Who’, on the basis that the answer is DOG?
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO.
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO. For me an enjoyable Monday excursion. I wasn’t confident about LARVA, but the rest went smoothly. No one has mentioned SQUEERS (I thought it might fall under the notorious GK umbrella) but that item brought back memories of one of my favorite moments in 50 years of playgoing, the RSC Nicholas Nickleby, with that character (and several others) played by Alun Armstrong.
Most of this was fine, but 1a was not a clue, just a definition. I have seen other setters use cryptic definitions one in a blue moon, and they’re fairly unobjectionable when they’re very, very clever. The problem with Rufus was that he relied too heavily on them and didn’t bother to make them clever or cryptic, and I don’t think we should encourage more of the same. The only trick to today’s 1a (as with many Rufus clues) was to know when to stop looking for anything cryptic and just fill in the first thing that occurred to you, thinking it must be part of some form of wordplay to follow but which is in fact the answer.
Ian SW3 @33
The thing I liked about 1a was at first sight (mine, at least), I thought I was looking for something like “ally”
A very enjoyable solve for us with one or two quibbles – but there are in most puzzles and it’s just the nature of the quibble that’s different. LARVA was my loi and a real pdm as I think of myself as someone who knows birds and was fixated on my certain knowledge that there isn’t a specific word for young peacocks! Nor could I make beau or the like work, so a very effective clue for me. I also really liked the conciseness of ROUND TRIP, and ticks by SCALPEL, SERPENT, SHRANK and INTEGRATE. I didn’t see the church part of WAFER nor the cryptic element of SEMAPHORE.
Thanks to Vulcan – keep up the good work – and to PeterO for the blog.
muffin @34: precisely. I’m genuinely puzzled by suggestions that 1a is not cryptic. At the risk of stating the glaringly obvious, there is a common phrase “to join forces”, which means, of two or more parties, to merge, to ally, to combine their strength. This is the normal meaning of the phrase, and is what is supposed to occur to the solver when initially reading the clue. However it can also be read as “join (the armed) forces”, hence ENLIST. So you have a normal, natural reading, and then a secondary reading, which is exactly how a cryptic definition is meant to work.
You may think the clue was too easy, or you may simply not like cryptic definitions in general. But to suggest that it was faulty in some way is just wrong.
(By way of contrast there is a clue in today’s Quiptic which I and a few others are struggling to see as cryptic.)
I, too, found this a very satisfying solve. I originally had Surgeon in 18D, and was feeling pleased with myself for remembering the other sense of theatre – until my husband pointed out that Poker Face would be a particularly appropriate answer to 27A…
Other favourites were Paramount, Wafer (although, Muffin, your suggested alternative clue is delicious!) and Dogwood.
I’d never heard of a Peacock butterfly, so Larva was a wild guess LOI…
Thanks Vulcan, and Pierre – also for the Tiger Woods gag! x
As mentioned before: I too liked Poker Face. I hate myself for not parsing “outings” correctly, though I also missed the parsing of wafer as did others. I’m confused by scoff … I would have said scarf down food, and when I google, scarf indeed seems to be correct (but then the first google hit is the urban dictionary … perhaps my only bit of urban slang correctly used).
As a side note, which I realize are not always welcome on this blog, I recognize that I am the Platonic ideal of a cryptic solver when my Uber driver in San Francisco apologized for the hip hop playing on the radio and immediately switched to NPR on my entering his car. sigh.
Truly awful.
Loose and just downright wrong in some places (as has been noted)
I wont be wasting any more of my time on Vulcan’s offerings.
I agree with WhiteKing@35. SEMAPHORE@3 isn’t cryptic. Being picky, it is also wrong. Semaphore is a method of sending messages by holding flags in the hands and positioning them at different angles to signify different letters, not by hoisting them up, and the messages needn’t be important.
Over all a bit of a curate’s egg, I thought.
We enjoyed this, thought of Rufus sometimes. But Rufus could be quite maddening with his double definitions, which depended on the penny finally dropping somewhere deep in the grey matter. Vulcan does seem to be going that way, but it’s a style and we appreciate it. Thank you very much all.
Pino @40, cannot see that anybody would go to all that trouble unless the message was important…
Haven’t managed to make it here to the forum for a few days. Getting to this one pretty late also. I thought this was an enjoyable start to the cryptic puzzling week. My favorite was PARAMOUNT. Like Bullhassocks @6, I had SPOOF for 26ac. (F)OOPS!
chrissie @18 – Got a laugh out of your Lady Gaga alternative clue for 27ac. I like it better than the one in the puzzle!
Many thanks to Vulcan and PeterO and the other commenters.
A regular Guardian solver. I love this site. I’d love it more if people who’s primary motivation is to show how clever they are didn’t bother to post. We have several examples here.
SEMAPHORE reminded me of Swallows and Amazaons, and, rather more recently, the Monty Python semaphore version of Wuthering Heights (from about 1m.30secs in this clip)
Muffin@45
Same here about S and A. I’ve recently finished rereading all 12. Nancy Blackett would no doubt say that all her messages were important.
Cookie@40
Before radio I think that semaphore was a routine method of communicating between ships.
Pino
You probably won’t see this, but I regularly re-read my favourites (S & A, Coot Club, We didn’t mean to go to sea, Secret Water and Pigeon Post) and, in particular, Winter Holiday the first time it snows!
Muffin@47
As it is unlikely that anyone who might object to my digressing from the puzzle is likely to read this perhaps I can add that having enjoyed the books as a youngster I reread them all at 40, 60, and now at 80. I don’t expect to do so again in 20 years time. Coot Club and The Big Six are favourites as I spent many holidays on the Broads. Winter Holiday has probably the longest semaphore message apart from Captain Flint’s in Missee Lee, if I remember correctly.
Best wishes for your reading on your 100th, Pino!
Muffin@49
Many thanks. If I do read S&A again I’ll let you know.