Sometimes, just for kicks, I like to browse through
dictionaries and other wordy books to see what fun things pop up. There’s
always something interesting.
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| Theseus and the Minotaur. The hero used a clew to find his way out of the labyrinth.
Illustration by Vasiliy Voropaev via Adobe Stock.
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For example, on a recent dip into The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, I learned that the
word clue comes from clew. These two words were once simply
different spellings of a word that meant “a ball of yarn or thread.”
Now you
may be wondering, as I was, how a ball of yarn morphs into something that helps
a clever detective solve a mystery. Remember the story of Theseus and the
Minotaur? Here’s the ultra-abridged version: The Greek hero Theseus ventured into
the Cretan Labyrinth, unrolling a ball of string (a clew) as he went, slew the
horrible Minotaur, and then followed the string to find his way out again. In
other words, he used a clew to solve a problem. He also later ditched Princess
Ariadne, who came up with the whole clew idea to begin with. Hey, heroes can be
jerks too.
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| A clew becoming a clue? Photo by uckyo via Adobe Stock. |
Later, the spelling clue
came to refer to those bits of information used by detectives. A clew is something used by knitters
(although I am a knitter, sort of, and wasn’t familiar with this meaning; I
normally refer to my yarn as “that tangled mess at the bottom of my knitting
bag”). Clew can also still mean
“clue” or “a metal loop on a lower corner of a sail,” proving, as if we didn’t
already know, that sometimes English is strange.
