Finish This Book: Becoming A Sleuth

Two weeks ago I shared a picture I was quite proud of that I had to draw for that page. The story continues, telling us that the author found a bunch of pages by a bench and so gathered them all up. There’s a brief bit of code which I’ve not deciphered yet and then we are told that on the cover it says ‘Instruction Manual’.

We have to discover who created it and why.

But before we get onto that we must first learn how to be sleuths. And we’re met by:
Research: definition of “sleuthing”
Research methods: dictionary, Internet, library

And so I sat in bed, trying to load up pages on my phone (very dodgy internet connection) and got down to researching using Google and various online dictionaries.

It says:

Definition of ‘sleuthing’ – from google – verb, present participle of ‘sleuth’ which means to carry out a search or investigation in the manner of a detective.

Apparently it comes from Middle English where it had the meaning to ‘track’ which in turn came from the Old Norse word ‘sloth’.

The term meaning ‘carrying out a search like a detective’ dates from the late 19th century – perhaps coming into use because of the rise in popularity of detective novels; People read about the exploits of Sherlock Holmes and wanted to get in on the excitement of ‘sleuthing’ themselves.

If a sleuth is a detective and I am to become one then this will obviously involve doing some sleuthing of my own. I think some of this will be to solve the mysteries of where the book came from and what the strange code was on the last past. I’ll have to deduce things and make links that other people might overlook. It’ll be interesting.

So yeah, that’s what I came up with. All the definitions were fairly similar so I just stuck with the one from Google. The linguistics geek in me had to include the origin for it and then I figured I’d include some history of the term as well as what I thought it means for me doing this book.

It’s interesting seeing where it will go.