(Beautiful women*)
"Please yourself, toots", I shouted after another lost commission, while it was busy slamming my door. I'd managed to establish that she was cute, but expected too much for too little and wasn't even ready to add a single date as a bonus. Perhaps I needed to reconsider going back to teaching.
I put my feet on the desk, took a flask of cheap bourbon out of the bottom drawer and started pouring some into my cold coffee. Then I thought better of it. Taking a sip straight from the bottle I suddenly realised that there was a piece of the jigsaw that I needed to investigate in another case: Who, or what, left the word there? And, with my track record, I should have suspected there would be some funny play in the etymology note's version of the events. But somehow I hadn't, so it took me by surprise and, just as I was taking the second sip, raised a gullible smile. I choked**.
sleuth
n.
1. A detective.
2. See sleuthhound.
v. sleuthed,
sleuth·ing, sleuths
v.tr.
To track or
follow.
v.intr.
To act as a
detective.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Short for
sleuthhound.]
Word
History: Tracking down the history of
the word sleuth requires a bit of etymological sleuthing. The immediate
ancestor of our word is the compound sleuthhound, "a dog, such as a
bloodhound, used for tracking or pursuing." This term took on a figurative
sense, "tracker, pursuer," which is closely related to the sense
"detective." From sleuthhound came the shortened form sleuth,
recorded in the sense "detective" as early as 1872. The first part of
the term sleuthhound means "track, path, trail," and is first
recorded in a Middle English work written probably around 1200. The Middle English
word, which had the form sloth, with eu representing the Scots development of
the Middle English o was a borrowing of the Old Norse word sldh, "a
track or trail."
*the (philosophical) investigating of
**it's interesting that smiling doesn't go well with drinking. Could it be pointing the finger at the seriousness of drinking? It merits a sombre investigation. (Oh lordy, what tripe... )
