Rule Britannia

On 13 September we published a Cryptic crossword set by Crucible (No 26,364) to celebrate the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall that evening. The clue for 1 down was 'Nice way to retain line in exhortation to Britannia (4)' for the solution RULE [RU(L)E, with 'rue' being a road in Nice].
Michael B., a long-time and loyal Guardian crossword solver who lives in France, objected that the 'rule' in 'Rule, Britannia/Britannia rules the waves' was not an exhortation, but was the optative form of the verb 'to rule'. In other words, when they sang that night in the Albert Hall, the audience was not ordering Britannia to rule the waves but expressing the fervent hope that she would continue to do so. His view was that the common error reflected in our clue is the result of the fact that many Victorian and later publications of the song, written by James Thompson and set to music by Thomas Arne, have the comma after the first 'rule' and have 's' at the end of the second one. However, its original and proper version has neither and reads: 'Rule Britannia/Britannia rule the waves'. He pointed out that Arne's other well-known song, God Save the Queen, is also not an exhortation to God to do the right thing, but an expression of the hope that he will continue to do so. Otherwise it would be 'God, Save the Queen'. And he is right, as you cancheck for yourself and in the McMaster University collection of Georgian songs.

Boatman's Cyptic puzzle of 19 September (No 26,369) contained a clue (27 across) which read: 'Little chap, separated from master wizard, about 99, with his staff (5,4)', which required 99 to be IC in Roman numerals in order to make MAGIC WAND [where 'little chap' = ALF, MA = Master of Arts, the wizard is GANDALF and W = 'with', producing MA/G(IC/W)AND(alf). Richard W. protested, having had a proper grounding in Latin at school, that the correct way to write 99 is XCIX, not IC. He was generous enough to say that, perhaps, by now IC is an established crossword convention and that there aren't any real Romans around to argue. This issue has come up before and, obviously, neither Julius nor any other of the Caesars would have had the least idea what IC was supposed to mean. But my memory is of some authority on post-classical, medieval and other dog god Latin with evidence that, for many hundreds of years, IC and the like were used pretty extensively, presumably to save space. However, if I found such an authority then, I cannot immediately find it now and so fall back on Australian support for the use of IC in Cryptic puzzles. www.highlightpress.com.au provides me with the following:
'Sometimes cryptic clues break the conventional use of Roman numerals. Examples: 49 = IL, 99 = IC, 499 = ID , 999 = IM.'

September's Genius (No 135 set by Crucible) produced 31 entries on the first day and 259 by the deadline. The first three in were from the same solvers in the same order as for the previous month: David H, Tony with Demon and Peter C in Queensland. The fourth, though, m1ferrier is, I think, a newcomer to the winners' enclosure.

Congratulations to Danuta Rosendorff from New South Wales, who is the winner of the September Genius puzzle.

• This article was amended on 13/10/2014. It originally stated Rule Britannia was set to music by "Robert Arne", instead of "Thomas Arne"

We hope you enjoy our crossword service. If you have any technical problems with it, please email userhelp@theguardian.com. If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email crossword.editor@theguardian.com. For Observer crosswords please crossword.editor@observer.co.uk.