We call it “enhancing the reading experience.”

Dear Word Detective: What is the best connection you can dream up between “lying” and  “drawing a long bow”? Is it related to what I call “adding to the truth”? I used to see it as related to playing on a violin but I could never get anywhere with that. — Ken in Alaska.

Ah, yes, the violin, the most deceptive of musical instruments. So fragile and delicate, yet so shamelessly manipulative. The mere sound of swelling violins on a film soundtrack has long been recognized as a signal of impending hokum and hornswoggling, and violins are, of course, anathema to cats. No instrument, save the harmonica, is so redolent of deceit and perfidy. And it doesn’t help that the things make anyone playing one look like Richard Nixon in his worst “I am not a crook” moment. The furrowed brow, the trembling jowls; like a bulldog eating an end table.

Thank heavens that violins have nothing to do with the phrase “to draw a long bow,” eh? It’s an idiom dating back to at least the 1660s meaning “to exaggerate; to tell tall tales,” so it’s both more and less than simply “lying.” There’s something about the topic of exaggeration, incidentally, that brings out the colorful phrases. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Historical Thesaurus lists such synonyms for “draw the long bow” as “to go beyond the moon” (circa 1430), “to turn every goose into a swan” (1621), “to overegg the pudding” (1845), and, of course, “to lay it on with a trowel” (which, a bit surprisingly, dates back to around 1616).

The “long bow” in the phrase is the English “longbow,” a fearsome weapon which dominated European warfare from its rise in the 13th century until the widespread adoption of gunpowder in the 16th century. The longbow was indeed “long,” usually roughly the height of a typical archer, made of English yew wood, and required a hefty 90-110 pounds of force to “draw” in order to fire an arrow. Using a longbow required long training as well as development of the physical strength required to use one. But in trained hands, the longbow was capable of punching an arrow through Medieval metal armor at great distances, and the English victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 was both the most famous victory and the high water mark of the longbow.

By the way, to “draw” (pull back) the bowstring on a bow employs “draw” (from the Old English “dragan,” to pull or drag, also related to “drag”) in its original sense of “to pull.” When an artist “draws” a picture, the pencil, etc., is “pulled” across the paper. “Draw” in the archery sense dates to the early 14th century; the “create a picture” sense arose around 1200.

As the “killer app” of Medieval warfare, the longbow inspired a large body of popular lore about the extraordinary feats of its users. English folk legends centering on Robin Hood, for instance, depict him as a master of the longbow and an almost supernaturally gifted marksman, easily capable of hitting tiny targets at enormous distances. The longbow also featured in a number of popular sayings still used today. “To have many strings to one’s bow,” a reference to archers carrying at least one spare bowstring into battle, means to have several alternatives or resources available (“Miss Bertram … might be said to have two strings to her bow,” Jane Austen, 1814). “To shoot another’s bow” means to practice an art or skill not your own, and “the bent of one’s bow” refers to a person’s character or inclination (“I have the bent of his bowe, that I know,” 1562).

Given the centrality of the longbow to English culture and the number of legends and “tall tales” that sprang up about the near-magical skills of its users, it’s not surprising that someone relaying an exaggeration or fantastic story would be said to be “drawing a long bow” as if  relating Robin Hood-esque feats of derring-do. Appearing first in print in 1668 (“There came to us several Tradesmen; the first of them a Poor Rogue that made profession of drawing the long Bow”), to “draw the long bow” is the equivalent of telling the traditional “fish story” about the huge catch that got away. It’s not really lying, because no one within earshot truly believes it’s true.

We’ll bait the trap with black coffee and blue pencils.

Dear Word Detective: I’m wondering about the phrase “at large” as in “editor-at-large” or “the fugitive is at large.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) indicates that “at one’s large” to mean “at liberty” has been in use since the 14th century, but how did this come to refer to editors?  And what does it currently mean? — Jackie.

Editors? I thought they were extinct. If they’re really running around “at large,” I wish someone would round them up and send them to the internet. Have you seen it lately? Even the websites of established print journals are full of typographical errors and half-baked edits that produce gibberish. Oh well, I’m probably paying too much attention to this stuff.

Living out in the country, I pay special attention to the phrase “at large” because rarely a month passes around here without a fugitive miscreant “at large” being apprehended loping through the corn. And then there was the “exotic animal collector” who released lions and tigers and bears down the road from us last year. There’s nothing like hearing that Bengal tigers are “at large” in your area to focus the mind (specifically on other, saner places to live).

“Large” is an interesting word because its original meaning in English is now obsolete, but it remains an exceptionally common word in senses that developed after its first appearance. When “large” appeared in English in the late 12th century, it meant “generous, lavish, bountiful,” reflecting its source in the Latin “largus” meaning “abundant and lavish.” This sense, now obsolete, developed into meaning “ample” or “copious,” and from there came into use in spatial descriptions meaning “roomy, spacious, etc.” From that “roomy” sense most of our modern uses of “large” developed, including “large” in various senses denoting great size as well as “large” in figurative senses describing the fullness or great substance of something, from “largeness of heart” (“That uxorious King, whose heart though large, Beguil’d by fair Idolatresses, fell To Idols foul,” Milton, 1667) to the “largeness” of more worldly treasures (“He made large profits on some articles, but his business did not pay on the whole,” 1902).

Meanwhile, that early sense of “large” meaning “roomy, spacious” had sprouted a slightly different branch of “large” in the sense of “free, unrestricted, without limitation.” Thus to be “large of circumstances” meant to have enough money to be able to live free of want or worry (“Many families who the last week were in large circumstances, were now reduced to beggary,” 1738), a sense still found in the US slang phrase “to live large,” meaning “to be wealthy and spend extravagantly.” In nautical use, a wind blowing from behind the ship was “large” because it provided freedom and ease of navigation to the vessel; to sail “by” the wind, on the other hand, was to sail into the wind, a trickier business. “By and large” as a nautical term meant “in any possible circumstance,” and eventually came to be used ashore to mean “in most cases; for the most part.”

This use of “large” to mean “free and easy; without restraint” gave us “at large” in several senses. The phrase first appeared around 1400 in the sense of literally “free, without restraint” (“Here walk’d the Fiend at large in spacious field,” Milton, 1667), still used in news stories about fugitives. “At large” was also, beginning in the 17th century, used to mean “in general, not in any particular sense,” a use now most familiar in “at-large delegate,” etc., meaning one who represents, for example, a whole state rather than one particular town or region. This brings us to “editor at large,” “writer at large” and similar phrases which simply mean that the person is “free”  to pursue projects or topics covering a wide range, often of their own design, rather than to simply fulfill assignments.