| 词组 | clew, clue |
| 释义 | clew, clue In the detective sense and its derivative uses, the usual spelling is clue. • After I wrote down all the clues, I knew it had to be you —Marjorie Seddon Johnson et al., Hopes (Second-grade text), 1977 • The discovery of the crime, by the clues left behind —H. A. L. Craig, London Calling, 17 Mar. 1955 • ... tried to look for clues as to why some patients with malaria would suddenly become worse and die —Thomas C. Butler, Johns Hopkins Mag., Summer 1971 • God knows how the Medawars came to select the topics they did.... There is no clue in the introduction —Jeremy Bernstein, TV. Y. Times Book Rev., 2 Oct. 1983 • ... the Russians don't have a clue about making shock absorbers, so their cars hop and bobble down the road —P. J. O'Rourke, Car and Driver, August 1983 The original spelling was clew. An early meaning of clew was "ball of thread, yarn, or string." Because of the use of a ball of thread to effect an escape from a labyrinth in various mythological stories—that of Theseus in the labyrinth of Crete, most notably—clew came to be used of anything that could guide you through a difficult place and, eventually, to be used of bits and pieces of evidence. The variant spelling clue, says the OED, began to be used in the 15th century, became frequent in the 17th, and in the late 19th became predominant in the "evidence" sense. • ... I'll follow up the clue (Clew? my stylograph won't spell) —Ellen Terry, letter, 4 July 1892 Partridge 1942 calls clew an American spelling. We do have fairly frequent evidence of it in the 1940s and early 1950s, but it has largely dropped out of use since then. The nautical use is always clew. |
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