About
Film still from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1977
The word “clue” comes from the archaic “clew,” or “klew,” meaning a ball of string. Our modern usage – “I don’t have a clue” or “having a clue” – is a reference to the myth of the Labyrinth:
Theseus entered the labyrinth to kill the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. He was only able to find his way out by retracing his path which he had marked by unwinding the klew (ball of string) given to him by Ariadne.
A clue is our way of finding our path out of a perplexing matter or a metaphorical labyrinth.