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

[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.