THAT NAME IS DEEP

When the young US writer Samuel Clemens worked as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, he surely saw crewmen ‘ sounding’ the river – measuring its depth – with the call “mark twain!” This meant they had measured two fathoms; a single fathom was six feet; ‘twain’ means ‘two’. Clemens first used the byline Mark Twain in 1863 as a newspaper reporter.