772-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Macmillan competition We came third. The English Club was second. The winner was Wordsmith, the home of Anu Garg's A Word A Day, which came romping up from behind at the last minute. But then his daily e-mail newsletter has rather more than a million subscribers, which makes World Wide Words's 50,000 readers look paltry. I'm delighted he has won: he deserves to. Many thanks go to everybody who supported World Wide Words. And a special welcome to all who have subscribed through learning about us via the competition.

Haywire Several readers argued that there was a specific reason why going haywire took on its sense of being out of control. Ken Shaw commented: "I was taught that when something went haywire, it was not only not working properly but was also dangerous. Hay bales are bound very tight. If the haywire snapped or was cut to open the bale, the ends whipped around and could inflict serious injury."

Others suggested that the term referred to the way in which baling wire left to its own devices would at once form a tangled mess. As David Means remembers, "When [farmers] would 'bust' a bale to use as feed for the livestock, typically the used loop of wire was tossed into an old washtub or a certain corner of the barn, where it was available for re-use somewhere else on the farm. Once there were a number of these wire pieces in the pile, they tended to get tangled when someone attempted to pull one out. This snarled mass was always difficult to work with, and that is the sense of the term 'haywire' that was passed to me: something that was almost hopelessly beyond repair or so contorted that it would take a long time to rectify."

John C Britton recalled another expression: "I heard as a child that something was held together with bubble gum and baling wire, being a by-gosh and by-golly emergency repair, that became the permanent fix, by gum."

Can anybody help? A query came from Anne Osborne in the UK: "An expression long in use in my family is going on teacakes and haybands. It is usually used about a clock behaving erratically, either gaining or losing. Does anyone else use it?"