Guardian 26,580 / Rufus

34 comments on “Guardian 26,580 / Rufus”

1. Thanks all
   It would obviously be rude o me to suggest that this puzzle has any failings, so I won’t.
   Last in 9ac and favourite, too.

2. Thanks Rufus and Eileen.

   I enjoyed this, especially PEWS, which fooled me, and AXIS, which I stupidly could not parse. The use of investments for SIEGES was new, as was TERN for a set of three.

   I also liked BOLT, TETHERED and CHAUFFEUR among others. ERITREA is the Greek name for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa (had to try out my italics).

3. Thanks Rufus and Eileen.

   I put ‘stab’ IN THE DARK at first – seemed to work. ‘Liberty, for example’ could have been a number of six-letter words such as bodice, bridge, horses, island etc., so a pretty poor clue, I thought.

   I did particularly like PEWS and BOLT.

4. Thanks Rufus and Eileen

   Back to normal Rufus today. I had written STAB IN THE DARK initially … which brought on BATTENED at 12a. Finally got INHUMANITY to fix it and give TETHERED as my last in.

   No real stand outs … but learnt a new French word with TANT.

5. Thank you Eileen,

   May I start with an apology to you and to Herb for my hopeless post of last Thursday (Screw, #26578). My excuse is that I had just landed from Los Angeles and I think my brain must have been on a later flight. Bafflingly, I somehow completed the crossword but then bungled the post. So sorry, I seem to do international travel less and less well these days.

   To today’s business, I rather enjoyed this. I had to look up ‘tern’ (ASTERN) and was interested to see it is at the root of ‘ternately’ meaning every third. Is the similarity to ‘alternately’, (every second) just conicidence, or are they linked? Perhaps an etymologist will drop in.

   Happy Bank Holiday all.

6. bruce@4 – me too (STAB IN THE DARK). I also messed things up with TORPOR instead of STUPOR. Couldn’t get SIEGES. I agree with Robi@3 about the problem with LIBERTY. But usual Rufus fare! Thanks to him and to Eileen.

7. Thanks Eileen and Rufus
   Enjoyed this for the most part. Took some time to see 9a and 26a. I didn’t much like 19d whose surface seems less polished than one expects from this setter.

8. ‘Stab in the dark’ didn’t occur to me, as I already had 10 and 12ac [since I boringly work through the clues in numerical order] but, otherwise, I might well have entered that.

   And Robi, my first thought for ‘Liberty’ was ‘bodice’ – but I didn’t expect anyone else to remember them!

   No need for any apology, William – hope you’re over the jet lag.

   Re ‘ternately’: it comes from the Latin ‘terni’, meaning a group of three, three each, from tres, three, whereas alternate comes from ‘alternus’, ‘every other [of two’ from ‘alter’, ‘the other [of two]’ – that’s why you can’t have three alternatives!

9. Thanks Eileen and Rufus.

   Another one for STAB, I understand the complaint about Liberty but was one of my first in, so no complaint from me. Casting back to school days BUNKED OFF wasn’t necessarily a hurried departure, indeed one had to be careful to make sure you didn’t get caught, or so I am told.

   As always I enjoy the Monday Rufus, nice to have one I can complete early in the week.

   [The captchas are getting harder 1+?=2 has now become 4*?=28]

10. Eileen, I had to wear a liberty bodice at boarding school in England where we spent a year, 1950, when I was eight, the rubber buttons on them got horribly sticky after they were sent to the laundry; the dormitory was cold and we had to break the ice in the water jugs to wash on winter mornings.

11. Happy Memorial Day from here in the U.S. I was unaware that there was a holiday today in Britain, too.

    How cryptic does a cryptic definition have to be before it’s kosher? Is there a standard? I ask because some of these are not especially cryptic. “Liberty, for example” would pass for a clue for STATUE in even an American-style crossword, where cryptic-ness is virtually unknown. And 17 ac, with Rolls capitalized, made it (to me) immediately obvious that CHAUFFEUR was wanted.

    Pedant’s corner: The actual name of the statue in New York Harbor is “Liberty Enlightening the World” (or, en Français, La Liberté éclairant le monde; the sculptor was French).

12. mrpenney @11, the Master of the Rolls is second in judicial importance to the the Lord Chief Justice, the clue fooled me for a while…

13. Thanks to Eileen for the blog.

    I am another STABber.

    I was all set to complain about 16d: assignation=anagrind then I came to this blog. I had totally forgotten that meaning of assign so thanks again to Eileen for reminding me.

14. Eileen @8 Many thanks for your good grace. Loved the etymology of alternate.

15. Pleasant stuff as always from Rufus – took me a bit longer than usual, and SIEGES was last in – like chas @13 that meaning of assign was at best vaguely familiar, probably only seen in crosswords.

    Thanks to Rufus and Eileen

16. This was plain sailing until 26ac which I simply couldn’t get. Why SIEGES? I ended up using the cheat button and having been given the answer I still don’t understand it.

17. Peter Aspinwall @16

    Investment is another word for siege. It has cropped up several times in crosswords.

18. I had no trouble with “shot” as opposed to “stab in the dark” (maybe it’s the more familiar US usage) but took a long time getting PEWS and SIEGES. As mrpenney points out, Liberty-STATUE was easy for a US solver, whereas the alternative (of 2 not 3 choices) “bodice” would have totally defeated me. Thanks to Rufus and Eileen.

    [Note for mrpenney: The episodes in the Inspector Morse series originally aired on the A & E network and are available on Netflix.]

19. Eileen@17. Thanks. I’ve just looked this up and Concise Oxford does give this as archaic. So I suppose I should have known it but I certainly can’t remember coming across it before. To fail on a Monday doesn’t bode well for the rest of the week! Oh well.

20. Thanks, Eileen.

    15′ today, or rather, infinity, as I failed to get SIEGE.

    PEWS was good. I do question AXIS, however, as it a line not a point

21. Peter Aspinwall @19

    You sent me burrowing in the archives again and I found these clues [all from Rufus] exploiting the ‘investment’ sense of siege:

    Investment but not necessarily of capital (5) – June 2nd 2014

    Ordered security in city investment, perhaps (8) – April 4th 2011 [answer: BLOCKADE – LOCK in BADE]

    Some solace in failed investment (6) – January 23rd 2011 [answer: RELIEF}

    Capital invested in 1857 (5)- November 23rd [answer: DELHI]

22. Thanks Eileen and Rufus. A mixed bag I thought, some of the CD/DDs were really excellent, PEWS and BOLT for example. On the other hand in UTOPIAN and DEPARTED the two meanings are so closely associated that it is hard to think of one without the other. Also LIBERTY seemed an odd clue for a cryptic puzzle. Basically the clue is “think of any 6 letter word linked with liberty”. How is this cryptic?

23. “Investment” for siege is not that archaic—you see it in military writing sometimes. I get the feeling it implies siege with bombardment, rather than just encircle-and-wait. I think I can recall Churchill using it a couple times in History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

    [ACD–thanks; I’ll look for it on Netflix.]

24. Eileen@23. That makes it worse. I must have done those crosswords so I was able to work out the answers. I’m clearly going into a decline.
    Mrpenney. It’s the OED that describes it as archaic and I don’t think that the fact that Churchill used investment in that way makes it any the less so.

25. Eileen @8

    It would take more Latin philology than I can muster (essentially, none), but I wonder if the Latin terni and alter might be connected?

    [Incidentally, you reminded me again of the Isaiah joke that you wheeled out not so long ago (comment 42 for Guardian 26571). I remember seeing an undergraduate production – The Frogs, I think – in which the joke was inserted without so much as a by-your-leave. In Latin (but with frater rather than canis). It started off “Dico, dico, dico” and you can probably take it from there.]

26. Dave E @20: Re “I do question AXIS, however, as it a line not a point”. In this clue the AXIS is a “turning point”, not a “point”, as in something tutning on its axis.

27. PeterQ @25

    English ‘binary’, ‘ternary’, ‘quaternary; come from the Latin for ‘twice’ [bis], ‘three times’ [ter] and ‘four times’ [quater]. As I said @8, ‘alternate’ comes from alter ‘the one’ or ‘the other’ of two – a different root.

    [Thanks for the joke!]

28. Could someone explain PEWS for me, please? It didn’t raise a smile with me – only a question mark after pressing the cheat button.

    Thanks.

29. Alastair @28 —

    One meaning of “form” is “a long seat or bench.” It’s not part of my everyday vocabulary, but I think I remember seeing it in books. Don’t children in Dickensian schools sit on forms?

    (I’m American, by the way, so if this is a common meaning over in the UK, then that’s my excuse for not knowing.)

30. Oh! That does ring a very vague bell Ted – thank-you. It’s not a common meaning at all.

    Happy Memorial Day!

31. Thanks Rufus and Eileen

    Ted @ 29: it’s not just Dickensian schoolchildren who sat on forms. When I started school in the late 1950s we sat on forms too. I assume that’s how classes came to be called first / second / third (etc) form, but haven’t checked it out further.

32. Peter Asplnwall @24, Colin Powell used the term in 2001, “The Northern Alliance does not want to physically enter Kabul, so we think it would be better if they were to invest the city…make it untenable for the Taliban to continue to occupy Kabul.”

33. Thank you Rufus and Eileen

    I failed to solve 9a and 26a.

    My favourite was 22a.

34. Statue was only cryptic by its simplicity, maybe the setter forgot to come back to that clue.

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