buying a clew

In Newman's book he mentions an operations memorandum sent from the Moscow Embassy to the State Department and received by the latter on on April 5, 1960. The memo (in response to inquiries about the whereabouts of Oswald) said in part "The Embassy has had no contact with Oswald since his departure from the Metropole Hotel in November, 1959 and has no clew as to his present whereabouts..."


From a Dec 5, 1963 statement by Priscilla Johnson: "I interviewed him, but years before the assassination; they were the ideas I had noted down with the aim of writing a piece on how the changing profile of the defector was a clew to the changing profile of Soviet society itself."

"Clew" is listed in the Oxford dictionary as "an archaic variant of clue".

No big deal if this spelling was still fairly common in 1959, but if it wasn't...?

Miss Prissy was kicked out of the USSR in July, 1960 among a host of others following the U2 incident, so she was still in Moscow at the time of the Embassy memo.

My initial reaction was it seemed unlikely to have been common much beyond the 1800s and seemed more like a phonetic misspelling, but apparently not:

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/08/clue-clew.html

Maybe has something to do with a regional thing, or upper-class (eastern) education in the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century?

dwdunn(akaDan) wrote:My initial reaction was it seemed unlikely to have been common much beyond the 1800s and seemed more like a phonetic misspelling, but apparently not:

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/08/clue-clew.html

Maybe has something to do with a regional thing, or upper-class (eastern) education in the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century?

Thanks Dan.

The link you provided states that the "clew" spelling could still be found in newspapers up to the 1970s, so may not be anything to this, apart from a stubborn regional quirk.