We have many words for troublemakers in English: ruffian, thug, hoodlum, yob, chav, lout… The list is endless. So, a “clew” came to mean something that guides your path, and later it came to mean this in the broader sense of offering guidance to discover a truth. He used the yarn to track his path so he could follow it back again if he got lost. When Mintatour – a monster with the body of a man and a head of a bull – trapped the mythical king, Theseus, in a labyrinth, Theseus is said to have escaped using a ball of yarn or a ‘clew’. It is taken from the word ‘clew’ In Greek mythology. Technically, English speakers stole this from the Greek Gods. Others (those who are perhaps more respectful of Lord Sandwich’s work) believe he ate food in this fashion only so he could stay at his desk and attend to his political commitments. Some believe he consumed his food between two pieces of bread so he didn’t have to leave his beloved gambling table, and that his fellow gamblers began to ask the servants for “the same as Sandwich” and, later, just “a sandwich”. The circumstances of Lord Sandwich’s supposed invention of the sandwich is a subject of hot debate among linguists. Sandwiches get their (strange) name from the 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th century English politician and nobleman. Out of an estimated 750,000 words, we’ve already identified the most beautiful, the funniest and the weirdest – but which English words have the strangest origins? 1. The English language is a curious melting pot of words from across the globe, forged through a millennia of invasions, wars, colonial expansion and scientific and cultural developments.
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