Guardian Cryptic 26724 by Rufus

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The puzzle may be found at http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/26724.

Particularly heavy on the double definitions.

Across
9 BRAKE DISC
Car taking record for deceleration? (5,4)

A charade of BRAKE (shooting brake – estate ‘car’ or station wagon; a brake was originally a carriage for training horses) plus DISC (‘record’).
10 AMEND
Morning getting close? Correct (5)

A charade of AM (‘morning’) plus END (‘close’).
11 TIGRESS
Catty female (7)

Cryptic definition.
12 UNAWARE
A French and a Western leader are in the dark (7)

A charade of UN (‘a French’) plus ‘a’ plus W (‘Western leader’) plus ‘are’.
13 ALICE
Young Victorian heroine caught in a lie (5)

An envelope (‘in’) of C (‘caught’) in ‘a lie’.
14 PRICELESS
Soft grain, inferior but still highly esteemed (9)

A charade of P (piano, ‘soft’) plus RICE (‘grain’) plus LESS (‘inferior’).
16 TIGHTROPE WALKER
Highly strung, one whose life may be in the balance (9,6)

Cryptic definition.
19 DISTEMPER
Fido’s upset the paint! (9)

Double definition.
21 SPINE
Personal column? (5)

Cryptic definition.
22 FORBEAR
Avoid showing fright when catching the ball (7)

An envelope (‘when catching’) of ORB (‘the ball’) in FEAR (‘fright’).
23 CRICKET
A game little insect (7)

Double definition.
24 SCRUB
Get rid of undergrowth (5)

Double definition.
25 TIP-AND-RUN
Kind of 23 where one’s quickly in and out (3-3-3)

Cryptic definition.
Down
1 ABSTRACTED
Daydreaming, make wrong bet at cards (10)

An anagram (‘make wrong’) of ‘bet at cards’.
2 DANGLING
Hanging about with a number, fishing (8)

A charade of D (Roman numeral 500, ‘a number’) plus ANGLING (‘fishing’).
3 RENEGE
Withdraw from the general uprising (6)

A reverse (‘uprising’ in a down light) hidden (‘from’) answer in ‘thE GENERal’.
4 AIRS
Exposes pretentiousness (4)

Double definition.
5 SCRUTINEER
Cross-examiner? (10)

Cryptic definition, with reference to an election official – a cross marks a vote.
6 PASADENA
Father’s unhappy over girl in California (8)

A charade of PA (‘father’) plus SAD (‘unhappy’) plus ENA (‘girl’).
7 MENACE
Troops master the threat (6)

A charade of MEN (‘troops’) plus ACE (‘master’).
8 EDGE
Fringe left off the shelf (4)

A subtraction: []]edge (‘shelf’) without the L (‘left off’).
14 PROSPERITY
In a way, property is wealth (10)

An anagram (‘in a way’) of ‘property is’.
15 SERPENTINE
Mineral water for Londoners (10)

Double definition: various rocks, and the lake in Hyde Park, London.
17 THE DERBY
They reared up in classic race (3,5)

An envelope (‘in’, with “poetic” word order) of DERB, a reversal (‘up’ in a down light) of BRED (‘reared’) in ‘they’.
18 KNICKERS
Thieves commonly said to filch female underwear (8)

Sounds like (‘commonly said’) NICKERS (‘thieves … to filch’).
20 SARTRE
Jean-Paul‘s wrongful arrest (6)

An anagram (‘wrongful’) of ‘arrest’.
21 SOIGNE
Goes in to fashion and being well-groomed (6)

An anagram (‘to fashion’) of ‘goes in’.
22 FAST
How to lose weight quickly (4)

Double definition.
23 CAPE
A head on one’s shoulders (4)

Double definition.
completed grid

37 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 26724 by Rufus”

  1. Thanks Rufus and PeterO

    Best Rufus for ages – I really enjoyed it. Favourites were mostly DDs in fact – DISTEMPER, SCRUTINEER and SERPENTINE stood out.

    For 21 I spent some time trying to find out if STILE was an alternative spelling for STYLE – the column that a “stylite” lived on. It is, nearly, but not quite exactly.

    I thought the “little” wasn’t needed in 23a, and I raised an eyebrow at “ace” = “master”.

  2. I enjoyed this, as is usual for me with Rufus’s puzzles, and found the double definitions rather fun. (Looking above just now, see that muffin @1 also liked some of the DDs.)

    Stupidly I entered RECEDE at 3d, completely missing the hidden word, but could not parse it of course.

    SCRUTINEER, PASADENA, SERPENTINE and THE DERBY were great.

    Thank you Rufus and PeterO.

  3. Seemed a bit more difficult than usual. I always start with the last down clue and work backwards so was pleased with the obvious NESS (head) hidden in 23 dn A head on oNE’S Shoulders. Grrr!

    Thank you Rufus and PeterO.

  4. Yes, I also thought this was a very good RUFUS, with some clever double definitions. Favourites were SPINE, SERPENTINE, DISTEMPER and SCRUTINEER (now seeing the second meaning, thanks to Peter O). Thanks also to Rufus.

  5. cholecyst @3, thanks for the laugh, that’s really good! I work the other way since crosswords are so challenging for me, thus did not spot that.

  6. Not happy. Brake disc as the solution started me off. Brake is so old now as a definition of car, what is ‘taking’ adding to anything, and it surely is ‘disc brake’! Add to that ‘ace’ for ‘master’ and the fact that it’s now raining so that I can’t wash the car/brake and I am not content. But thanks to both anyway!

  8. Thanks Rufus & PeterO.

    Good start to the week with some good clues. I particularly liked SCRUTINEER & SERPENTINE was good, although I didn’t realise it was a mineral.

    Some small quibbles: 6d would have been better with ‘…girl’s place…’ and 23d would have benefited from ‘…that’s on…’ to get the correct grammatical forms.

  9. [Robi @ 8
    Serpentine is best known in this country for making up the bulk of The Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. The area has an unusual flora as a result of the unusual base rock.]

  13. For me, this was Rufus at his most exasperating – too many less than obvious cds and dds. SOIGNE was last in after SPINE – both took me longer than they should have, and although I was vaguely aware of the word SOIGNE I wouldn’t have known what it meant.

  14. beery hiker @13
    I came across SOIGNE through cycling – a “soigneur” is the person that gives the rider a rub down etc. after a day’s competition.

  15. Thanks to PeterO for the blog.

    I thought 13a was very poor as LIONESS would fit the clue just as well. I had to wait for the crossing letters to pick the right answer.

  16. Like BH @ 13,my last ones in were SPINE and SOIGNE but I can’t say that I found this exasperating. I thought this was rather a good Rufus. I liked SERPENTINE, DISTEMPER and DANGLING.
    Thanks Rufus.

  17. Thanks to Rufus and PeterO. Several terms were new to me: BRAKE (as a make of car), DISTEMPER as paint, SCRUTINEER (as equivalent to US “poll-watcher”), and TIP-AND-RUN (to one not knowledegable about CRICKET), but most were clear from the clues. SPINE, SOIGNE, and AIRS were last in. More of a challenge than the usual Rufus but fun.

  19. beery @18, I just entered AND-RUN until I had a crosser that decided between HIT and TIP (didn’t take very long).

    My own embarrassment, as a Londoner, was SERPENTINE, last in. This was one of two clues left over before I started a walk (the other, MENACE, was held up due to expectation of an RE start); the walk was to the London suburb of Whetstone; and 15d could potentially end in -STONE, so I kept trying to think of other ‘stone’ suburbs …

  20. beery hiker @18
    I wrote in “tip-and-run” (what I’ve always called it), but was prepared to be cross if it turned out to be “hit-” 🙂

  21. Fairly new to cryptics, and find myself enjoying Rufus more and more.

    Last in were SERPENTINE and AIRS. Enjoyed PASADENA (controversially perhaps) and DANGLING. Didn’t much like PRICELESS although I got it quite quickly.

  22. I never would have thought of “brake” as a vehicle, and when prodded think of something rickety and rural. Now having checked I see that these days a shooting brake is neither, but is more something of a fashion statement.

    Unlike cholecyst@3, I do crosswords in the usual order, but just like cholecyst I put in “ness” for the same reason. That left me with “t_s-__ __ __-R __ __” which I tried to mangle into something related to “to and fro” till a checker dropped.

    To Robi@8 — I don’t object to “in [place name]” as definition, myself. I’m sure I’ve seen it here often. Even though I do better with “in California” than with, say, “in Suffolk,” I enjoy those too and can usually assemble the bits into something that looks as if it ought to be the name of a town.

  23. Hattie @ 21 – Welcome to the world of cryptics! As you have probably already discovered, Rufus has own rather particular style which is engaging / frustrating / satisfying / too easy / too loose (e.g. TIGRESS / LIONESS today) etc etc, depending on your predilections. I rather like him, but once a week is enough!

  28. Count me as one who had “hit-and-run” for a while there. It’s a pretty familiar baseball term (for a particular baserunning strategy), and there are a few parallels between baseball and cricket, after all. Looking up the cricket definition of tip-and-run, it seems that ALL baseball is tip-and-run.

    I’m guessing that you play cricket as tip-and-run when you want the game to take two hours rather than five days.

  29. mrp @28 – tip-and-run cricket is generally only played by children, and in my day (the mid 70s) it was quite often called hit-and-run. The short “hit and giggle” form of the professional game is twenty twenty – when that started about 10 years ago it used to take about an hour for each of two innings, but that has gradually slipped too and it’s often a 3 hour or more game now. The similarities with baseball are very superficial – they really are very different games…

  30. I found this trickier than some of Rufus’s, but I got there in the end. I hadn’t heard of TIP-AND-RUN so I too entered HIT, but PROSPERITY showed that must be wrong. CAPE gave the P but I still wasn’t sure whether it was TIP or TAP so I had to resort to google. I remembered shooting brakes from old films, so I didn’t have any problem with BRAKE DISC. SOIGNE was my LOI, as although the anagram fodder was obvious, the word itself didn’t come to mind until I had all the crossers – it’s not a word I come across very often.

    Favourites were PRICELESS, SPINE, PROSPERITY, SERPENTINE and THE DERBY.

    Thanks to Rufus and PeterO.

  32. Beery @29–(now firmly off topic, but of course it’s late in the day)–I’ve seen a little cricket (plus quite a lot of baseball), so I do know something of how different the two games are. I’d say that the similarities are more than superficial—the games share a common origin, and you can see a little of each in the other’s genetic code, so to speak. It’s kind of the same way that French and Romanian are both Romance languages, yet mutually unintelligible.

    I learned the basics of cricket, watching a few hours of it, far more quickly than I would have if I hadn’t been a baseball fan, for sure.

    (By contrast, American football was almost no help in figuring out rugby.)

  33. Sorry to be stupid but could someone please explain SPINE and DISTEMPER? The blog explanations of ‘cryptic definition’ and ‘double definition’ leave me none the wiser.

  34. simonc @ 33
    I too was struggling with DISTEMPER and was reading the blog hoping to find an explanation when the penny dropped just as I read your comment.
    Distemper as a canine disease could be called “Fido’s upset” if your dog was called Fido and is also a type of paint hence dd.
    Your spine is your “personal column” hence cd.

  35. Simonc:
    ‘distemper’ is both a canine ailment and a whitewash-type paint
    ‘spine’ – think ‘spinal column’

  36. Thanks Rufus and PeterO

    Away from printer for last 5 days, so seriously in catch up mode. What better way than a pleasant Rufus to start with … nothing too challenging, although I hadn’t heard of BRAKE as a car before.

    Always known it as TIP AND RUN down here, so 25a went straight in.

    Finished in SE corner with SERPENTINE (didn’t know the Hyde Park lake), SPINE and SOIGNE (a new word).

  37. Thanks PetetO.

    Oh Rufus, Rufus, Rufus. Bless you for your irritating style, the need to pencil in just in case ( e.g. TIGRESS/LIONESS), and then you throw in the odd foreign word without indication (SOIGNÉ).

    ……and I wouldn’t call a CRICKET a ‘little’ insect.

    But then there are one or two endearing clues – PRICELESS was excellent I thought even if relatively simple.

    Hey ho. Maybe I’d be more appreciative if I actually did these on the day rather than my perennial few days behind.

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