Get a clue
CLUE, n. This word, which we now use to mean something that “points the way, indicates a solution, or puts one on the track of a discovery; a key. Esp. a piece of evidence useful in the detection of a crime” (OED), used to be spelled “clew”—in English, spelling is whatever we want it to be—and it used to mean a ball of thread or yarn. Readers savvy in classical mythology will already have found their way out of this maze: the connection is Theseus using a “clew” to navigate the labyrinth.
Edward Burne-Jones, Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, pencil, brown wash, pen and ink on paper, 1861. Source.
It strikes me as slightly unusual for a word’s figurative sense to replace its literal sense, but that’s what happened here. I guess we don’t talk about balls of thread as much as we used to, and it really is very useful to have a single word that means “information that helps to discover something.”
The OED notes the colloquial phrase “not to have a clue” as in “to know nothing” from 1870, and “clueless” from around the same time. “Get a clue” doesn’t appear in the OED, but my two-second Google Ngram indicates that it’s mainly a late 20th- or early 21st-century usage.
Speaking of both clues and clews, over the past couple weeks in small-r romance, I’ve read books with murders, heists, and textile workers. Here they are.
Love Kills Twice (bi cis f/nonbinary character attracted to women, contemporary, suspense) by Rien Gray. This is a short romantic suspense novel about a woman who hires an assassin to kill her abusive husband and then falls in love with the assassin. It’s dark and wicked and very sexy. I especially loved Campbell’s POV and all the little details they notice, like when they warn Justine to tuck her elbow in long before the restaurant server appears with a precariously balanced tray. Content guidance: abuse, murder, sex.
The Hellion’s Waltz (f/f, both cis and bi, historical) by Olivia Waite. A sapphic historical heist! With a union of textile workers getting revenge on a merchant who cheats them—and long years ago had one of them unjustly transported, leading her to come back with a new identity and a thirst for vengeance, Count of Monte Cristo style. I love that all three of the books in Waite’s sapphic historical series have older queer women as supporting characters, making it very clear that none of this is new. And all three of them have such a fascination with and appreciation for various crafts and industries—embroidery, beekeeping, printing, and now silk weaving, tailoring, and music composition and performance. This is great fun. Content guidance: death of a parent, emotional abuse, sex.
Winter’s Orbit (bi m/gay m, both cis, sci-fi) by Everina Maxwell. This is a delightful slow-burn romance set against a backdrop of enormously complex galactic political intrigue, including murders and marriages of convenience. This book has a creative approach to language, where instead of made-up names for alien creatures, the animals are all called recognizable words like “doves” or “bears.” Then a character from another planet will object to the animal name by saying, for example, “where I come from, bears have fur and four legs.” It is uncanny as hell and I love it. Anyway, the married-for-political-convenience protagonists also get stranded in the wilderness and have to rely on each other to survive—this is where the bears come in, naturally—and this newsletter is a years-long record of how weak I am for that trope, so of course I loved it. Content guidance: abuse, torture, murder.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, a set of essays about how feminism should focus on issues of housing, and hunger, and gun violence, among many other things that affect Black and brown women and queer and trans folks, instead of being a way for white women to climb one rung higher in our exploitative hierarchy and become CEOs just like white men. I’ve been following Mikki Kendall on twitter for a long time and this book was just as clear and straightforward and correct as her tweets. It’s a great read.
