Comments on: Guardian 24386/Rufus

By: Paul B

Paul B — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:24:51 +0000

Yes Eileen, but patients do complain of their complaints. I agree with that Andrew.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:20:53 +0000

For 22ac, I was looking too hard for a non-naval meaning of “bay” and, having the W in place, decided the second word must be “window”…

I guessed 10ac but didn’t know that meaning of “jolly”. I liked the definition though.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:37:21 +0000

Sorry, Andrew. Yes, I realised as soon as I’d posted the comment that you had got it. Dictionaries do give ‘complaint’ as having the two distinct meanings of ‘grievance’ and ‘ailment’. I thought it was ok.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:26:28 +0000

Eileen - yes, I got 27ac. I just thought it was rather a weak clue, COMPLAIN and COMPLAINT being so closely related.

By: Eileen

Eileen — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:38:28 +0000

27ac: COMPLAIN[t]

29ac Yes, ensigns and gallants are both flags, and also people, hence the comments at 4 and 5 re similarity of clues

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:27:39 +0000

For some reason I found this a lot harder going than usual for Rufus, even apart from the slightly obscure naval references. No one has yet mentioned 27ac, which I thought was a bit unsatisfactory.

29ac - I presume this refers to flags (e.g. the White Ensign) which could conceivably be said to climb (”run up”) masts, as well as the Naval rank.

By: muck

muck — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:49:16 +0000

3dn GALLANTS: I have the defn as ‘adventurous men’, ‘of old’ meaning an obsolete word: the top-gallants were among the highest sails on the old square-rigged ships.

By: Colin Blackburn

Colin Blackburn — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:59:25 +0000

I checked earlier and it’s not listed under Tim Moorey’s excellent list of indicators in Chambers Crossword Dictionary.

By: Paul B

Paul B — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:56:15 +0000

As part of my quest for some kind of life I limited my inquiries to Chambers Online, but ‘capacity’ has to be a bit rum.

You’ll be relieved to hear it’s still a noun um, except when it’s a adjective (well, sort of modifying noun) but since ‘capacity’ as in crowd seems to be all you can get, at best it’s a bit like ‘potential’ - this is used fairly frequently as a post-positional nounal jobby. I regret to inform that I’ve never been convinced.

Even in Ruth Crisp, whose generally excellent list of anagrams (in her wicked book ISBN 0-340-57398-8) contains a few of these, neither hide nor hair of capacity is seen.

By: PaulW

PaulW — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:44:57 +0000

I have never seen CAPACITY used as an anagram indicator and I wonder what the compiler really intended. RANDOM would have done nicely.