sawflies and the origin of the word 'clue'

Walking in Darebin Parklands today, my companions and I noticed a crowd of sawfly larvae crawling across the path. I took a photo, but didn't try to get a good one, because it didn't occur to me that I would want to post it here on my word blog...



The larvae were clumped together, but not in a ball, as they are often seen. I presume they were more spread out because they were headed across the path. There's a better photo here, at the South Australian Government Forestry site, showing them in a ball on a tree.

Later in the day, I happened to say I didn't have a clue about something, and I wondered where the word clue comes from. I seem to recall reading it spelled clew in an old Sherlock Holmes novel.

The Phrase Finder explains that, although the word clue today means 'an insight or an idea that points us to a solution',

a clue (also spelled clew) previously had a different meaning - a globular ball formed from coiling worms or the like [my emphasis] or, more specifically, a ball of thread. Clew has been used with that meaning for at least a thousand years and citations of it in Old English date back to 897AD, when no less an author than Aelfred, King of Wessex used it in his West-Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care. Shakespeare also used the word with the 'thread' meaning, for example, in All's Well that Ends Well, 1602:

"If it be so, you have wound a goodly clewe."

Phrase Finder goes on to explain that the modern meaning came from the ancient Greek tale in which Theseus used a ball of thread to find the way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth.

At Lowchens Australia there's a list of collective nouns for animals, and for worms it has 'a clew of worms'. (I wonder why a dog-related site has this list.)

SheilaMatilda posted a photo of a clew of earthworms seen in her compost bin. Now I'll know the correct term when I come across one in my compost heap.

omitting apostrophes

The Australian Government Style manual, the official arbiter of grammar and punctuation in Australian publications, says of apostrophes:

It is increasingly common for the apostrophe to be dropped from the names of other institutions where the plural reference is a human reference - for example, Geologists Conference, Plumbers and Gasfitters Union. In all such cases, the plural word is not strictly possessive; its relationship with the following word or phrase is associative or descriptive, rather like an adjective.

Now, a toilet block is not usually considered an institution. But, maybe I shouldn't always smile when I'm walking in Darebin Parklands and I see these two signs:


















I always have an image in my mind of little 'mens' and 'womens' making their way into the toilet block. I don't know why they have to be little, but that's the way my imagination processes it.

If I visualise the toilets as a meeting place, a kind of informal conference centre, and think of the words as having the understood extra word, toilet - mens toilet, womens toilet - then it sort of fits the rule I quoted at the start of this post, ie it's not a place owned by men or women, but a place where they are gathered.

But, deep down, I want to add an apostrophe.

biomes and a brave new world of weeds

I learned a new word today - biome.

Your Dictionary.com defines biome as ‘any of several major life zones of interrelated plants and animals determined by the climate, as deciduous forest or desert’.

Our favorite walking spot, Darebin Parklands in Melbourne, is suffering terribly in the drought that has gripped southern Australia, and huge areas of the previously lush grassland are barren cracked expanses of dirt. But the weeds are surviving - for instance, resilient little fennel plants. (If you click on this picture to enlarge it, you will see a little patch of green in the bottom right corner.)







Our local paper, Heidelberg and Diamond Valley Weekly, had an article this week that gave me a fresh perspective on weeds. It seems that the Sydney Botanic Gardens Trust has recently issued a report suggesting that climate change may result in a world dominated by the plants we call weeds.

Wondering why they should say this, I checked out a few sites on the Net and found the reason is that most plants are very specific in their requirements for surival, so as biomes change, plants will die out. But the ones that are not so choosy will live on.

Maybe we should get used to a world of fennel. After all, it’s quite tasty cooked up with a fresh piece of fish.

My Etymology places the first use of the word biome in the twentieth century, with Merriam Webster specifying 1916, though I haven’t been able to discover the actual source of this first usage.