Clues from Clews
I’ve been dipping into The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories again. Today 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 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.
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.
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