One of the reasons that Alfred the Great was so great was that he kicked the Vikings out of England.
Another was that he wasn't just a soldier but also a scholar. Today's podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast After 80 years or so of ongoing Viking pillaging the state of English literacy had sunk pretty low so Alfred actually himself sat down and translated Latin texts into the common tongue—what we now call Old English—so that his subjects could benefit. One of these texts was Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care and it is in this Old English translation that the word clue makes its first appearance. But it had quite a different meaning.
Today a detective looks for clues at a crime scene, but in King Alfred's day 1100 years ago, and right up through the time of Shakespeare a clue was a bunch or ball of things. In fact, the word ball didn't show up for the first 300 years of clue 's existence. Alternately spelled clew, this bunch or ball seems often to have been a ball of thread or twine.
Today we use the metaphor of the “thread of a conversation” and similarly our ancestors used the metaphor of a ball or clue of thread as an aid in finding their way through a maze or labyrinth. Eventually the literal meaning of a ball of string was lost.
But most people haven't got a clue. I also wanted to let you know about an online spelling bee that Ben Zimmer at Thinkmap.com and The Visual Thesaurus alerted me to. Evidently since the past summer 15,000 people have tested their wits against Thinkmap's computers to the tune of half a million words spelled (and I suppose often misspelled). So that means that people who like it, like it a lot.
