posted on Oct, 17 2004 @ 05:33 PM
Found this at
www.pballew.net...
and thought it interesting
Clue or Clew
One evening as my wife and I sat reading in the Library of our home she turned to me and said, "Hey, Wordman," (she never calls me wordman unless
she has a word she thinks she can stump me with)"Do you know where the word 'clue' comes from?" I pondered for a moment, and had to admit I
didn't have a clue.
The origin, as she gleefully told me, goes back to the ancient Greek myths about a Monster who lived on the Island of Crete during the reign of king
Minos. Each year fourteen people were sacrificed to the monstor, a Minotaur. It seems that Theseus volunteered to be part of the group andwent into
the Labyrinth hoping to kill the Minotaur. The Minotaur was a half man-half bull, son of Minos�s wife Pasiphae and a beautiful bull, sent to Minos by
Poseidon, to whom Minos was to sacrifice it. He didn�t do the sacrifice, so Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with it. The Minotaur was the result.
Minos confined it in a Labyrinth built by the architect Daedalus. As he makes his way into the labyrinth, Theseus leaves a trail to find his way back
out by unwinding a ball of string. In Old English, a ball of thread or twine was called a clewe, and so a method of guiding us toward the solution to
a mystery or puzzle became known as a clew, or clue. Both spellings seem acceptable according to my dictionary, but I cannot recall ever seeing any
other than clue in American English.