Clue

The word that’s a ball of thread.

Every mystery depends upon one. Every detective hopes to find one. Every crossword promises several. Yet for centuries, a clue wasn’t a hint. It wasn’t evidence. It wasn’t information. It was a ball of thread. Which raises a rather obvious question.

How on earth did that become clue?

The answer lies in the ancient Greek story of the Minotaur. Before entering the Labyrinth, Theseus is handed a simple ball of thread by Ariadne. As he ventures deeper into its twisting passages, he unwinds it behind him. The thread doesn’t tell him which path to take. It simply means that, wherever he wanders, he can always find his way back.

The older English word clew meant exactly that: a ball of thread. Then something extraordinary happened. At first it referred only to the ball of thread itself. Over time, it came to mean what the thread had been doing all along. Helping someone on their way.

But the thread doesn’t end there.

For centuries, thread and weaving have offered us some of our richest ways of talking about discovery and understanding. We still lose the thread of an argument. We unravel mysteries. Writers search for good material. In Spanish, stories are still woven (tejer una historia). The words aren’t related. But the metaphor is.

Across languages, some of humanity’s oldest crafts became some of its oldest ways of thinking. Imagine a tapestry. It emerges thread by thread, each strand revealing a little more of the picture until, eventually, the whole design comes into view. A detective story works in much the same way. One clue is rarely enough. Only when the final thread falls into place does the pattern reveal itself.

We have always loved following clues. We don’t simply enjoy having answers. We enjoy finding them. Look closely enough and you begin to see clues everywhere.

• Every scientific breakthrough began with an observation that refused to go away.

• Every expedition with a horizon.

• Every archaeological dig with the suspicion that something lay beneath the soil.

• Every detective story with a footprint.

• Every child with a single question: Why?

They’re all following threads.

Every discovery begins the same way: not with immediate answers, but with something worth following…

- the word collector, behind the counter