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[30] How did tangle and weave get their names?

[Later, this item might move to the general FAQ by David B. Thompson]

Archive-Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 00:59:43 CST

In a reply, Cameron Smith wrote:* "One of the problems with having a single preeminent writer in a language is that everyone always assumes that any enduring tidbit came from his pen ...".* Fortunately, for the question How did tangle and weave get their names, the circulus vitiosus of erroneously quoting William Shakespeare could be broken. The full answer:

  O, what a tangled web we weave
  When first we practise to deceive!

    -- Sir Walter Scott, _Marmion_, canto 6, verse xvii (1808)

Cameron also suggested to include these lines by Richard Palais (1982):

  O, what a tangled WEB we weave
  When TeX we practise to conceive!

Concerning FWEB, JAK reluctantly remarks [M-1]: "We shall call this new version FWEB when necessary ...".

And more recently: ``I now think the choice of `F' in FWEB was a mistake. `F' stands for Fortran, which motivated this project, but the ability of FWEB to handle multiple languages is one of its most distinctive and useful features. But it's probably too late now.''