Mark Twain passage of boat, was a measure on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain." The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "The water is deep and it is safe to pass." Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In "Life on the Mississippi", he wrote: Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot
Old English grammar Old English had free word order, this is not quite true, as there were conventions for the positioning of subject, object and verb in clause. Old English did not use forms equivalent to "who, when, where" in relative clauses (as in "The man whom I saw") or subordinate clauses ("When I got home, I went to sleep"). Instead, relative clauses used one of the following: Preposition-fronting ("The man with whom I spoke") did not normally occur. Subordinate clauses tended to use correlative conjunctions, e.g. The word order usually distinguished the subordinate clause (with verb-final order) from the main clause (with