Issue number 1

Installed: 24-4-2000

The Origins of Language

This month's article deals with the origins of the colloquialisms "how long is a piece of string?" and "as the crow flies."

The origins of both these phrases are tied up together. They derive from old practices in the field of cartography, and both are now somewhat outdated. Crows are free to fly wherever they wish these days, but things were very different when cartographers were first attempting to accurately measure the distances between two places.

In the days before satellite imaging, it was tremendously difficult to measure distances of anything more than ump hundred metres (or yards as it would have been then.) To measure any greater distance, cartographers developed a method whereby one end of a piece of string was fed to a crow, and after time (and the piece of string) passed, the ends would be tied down at the points to be measured between.

The crow would then be forced to fly along the length of the string to the other point, thus providing a measurable straight line between the points, hence the original expression, "as the crow flies along the length of a piece of string tied between two points." This unwieldy phrase was soon shortened to pretty much the forms we know today, for more individual use: "How long is a piece of string?" asks us what the distance is between the two points, the answer being the distance "as the crow flies."

This background also provides the origins of the development of such man made fibres as nylon. Early efforts to pass a piece of string through a crow resulted in disaster as, of course, the crow digested the cord, but with advances in textile technology, the advent of artificial fibres meant that a piece of string could be introduced to the crow's digestive tract without it being destroyed.

The cartographers very soon realised that the crows were entirely superfluous to requirements, but they continued to use them as they'd developed into a tradition. Well, that's cartographers for you.