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The similarity between the words ‘alimentary’ and ‘elementary’ makes it a commonly misspelled word (along with access/excess, effect/affect and others), writes Stevyn Colgan in Joined-Up Thinking ( www.panmacmillan.com).

The similarity has often been used for puns, he adds. “For example, in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever some of the gemstones in question are hidden inside a corpse. When Felix Leiter asks Bond where the diamonds are, he replies, ‘Alimentary, my dear Leiter,’ a spoof on the famous catchphrase of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.”

Although similar in pronunciation, the two words are entirely unrelated, informs Colgan.

“One comes from the Latin alimentum, meaning food; the other from elementum, meaning part of a series or component.”

The most quoted of Holmes’ various lines may be ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ but he never uttered these words in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories, Colgan notes. (Wikipedia has this to say, as a footnote in a page on Holmes: “In the stories by Conan Doyle, Holmes often remarked that his logical conclusions were ‘elementary,’ in that he considered them to be simple and obvious. He also, on occasion, referred to his friend as ‘my dear Watson.’ However, the complete phrase, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ does not appear in any of the sixty Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.”)

Enjoyable read.

D. MURALI

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