They comb their hair with a herring-bone comb

[venta]

And another thing...

From the Daily Mail:

Aware that News of the World staff might use their final edition to fire a parting shot at her, Rebekah Brooks is said to have instructed two senior executives to read the paper with a ‘fine toothcomb’.

Now, I don't know if that's the Daily Fail's error, or Rebekah Brooks' error. And it's not the first time I've seen it. But really, guys...

Do you comb your teeth? No.
So is it likely that a toothcomb is a thing? No.

It's a fine-tooth(ed) comb, you idiots.

Comments

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Historically the object was called a toothcomb, and came in degrees of fineness. But now we don't use that word, and the object is just called a comb, so fine-tooth comb makes more sense.

(Must be true, they said it on QI).

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er, y'know sometimes I'm not very convinced by QI :)

Although it turns out I'm wrong, and a toothcomb really is a thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toothcomb).

Although, I imagine, not the thing that was meant.

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry!

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Oh, I dunno; the QI book wheeled out a bunch of nonsense about Oestre being a hare-headed fertility goddess, and what with his last public meltdown after pontificating about women's sexuality, I think casting a little bit of doubt his way can't be an entirely bad thing...

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I was just quoting Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip.

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

* like *

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

[giggle]

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I don't know, if there were lemurs maybe Rebekah Brooks could claim they authorised the payments to the private investigators. "I always thought we were doing something wrong training long-tailed office pets to forge our signatures", said Brooks, as Murdoch looked on admiringly.

Re: I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think you might be on to something - it's certainly an angle that I feel has been underinvestigated in the media to date...

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Having hairy teeth is a sign of madness, much like hairy palms.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I thought it was a sign that you needed to brush your teeth more often!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean comb?

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Brush your comb? What madness is this?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I frequently comb my brush...

[metame.livejournal.com]

They clearly didn't look at the crossword very carefully. Seem to be a few pointed references: eg.
"Woman stares wildly at calamity" - DIsaster

(and I also love how the equating of Woman with Di carries on to the bitter end.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8628690/News-of-the-World-final-crossword-has-a-message-for-catastrophe-Rebekah-Brooks.html

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The Oxford dictionaries reckon that fine toothcomb is sufficiently widely used as to now be considered acceptable. (Actually, jsut checking, my COD from 1995 was happy with it.) Of course, OK as usage doesn't mean it's not an error of sense.

This and this are quite interesting, although it doesn't seem to understand hyphens. Strange that the -ed version doesn't seem to be used at all in British.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

-ed is certainly the version I'd use. With a hyphen, though, so it might not show up on there.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I love the way you put things!

[condign.livejournal.com]

I feel I should call you out on your prejudice against furry-toothed Daily Mail editors.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think you may have a point. The people I choose to spend time with are invariably smooth-toothed; I grew up in a smooth-toothed family and it's what I'm used to.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

Maybe she actually told them to read it with a toothcomb, and that's why she can't do her job properly? :-)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find that reading works best when I do it with my beady organs of sight...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Also, how does one read with any sort of comb?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Since they missed the highly un-subtle crossword clues, I think we can safely infer the answer is "badly".

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

A fine toothcomb allows one to read the fine print, so long as the writing is in the form of carefully manicured and elegantly topiarised toothhairs. Some blind people who are particularly fluent with Braille have been known to read toothhair script using only their fingers, but for the rest of us, a toothcomb in the correct point size is the only option (sadly teeth per inch do not correspond precisely to modern desktop publishing point sizes; as has already been established, toothhair script is quite archaic, and so without a Truchet-DTP-toothhair slide rule it's almost impossible for even a gifted amateur to determine which toothcomb grade is called for).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Went to Cresswell Crags recently, and they have the really archaic stuff - fragments of woolly-toothed mammoth script and such.

At least, that's what they said it was. I couldn't really make out much beyond a few slightly odd partings, but there were modern-day acryllic recreations and such to get the kids interested.

Of course, neolithic toothcombs were all handmade so not only non-comformant to modern point sizes, but also highly individual. Alledgedly it worked as a form of very basic security between comb-owners but that sounds a bit like an academic's flight of fancy to me.

[(Anonymous)]

I think that Whyte and Maxwell's report (Journal of Paleocryptography, 2011) on the finding of paired toothcombs in neighbouring caves in southern France does lend some credible support to the security theory. They used electron microscopy to determine that the two toothcombs had been split from the same piece of flint, so the match was near-perfect -- kind of the stone age equivalent of entangling yer quanta.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

(Sorry, that was me!)

[metame.livejournal.com]

;)

That's some fine napping. Not sure I can think of a more difficult material to try to work into a comb than flint.

Well, OK I can: Jelly. But that would just get silly... and they didn't have it in neoliffic times.