Eggcorn Forum

“Clueless” has had a place in the English vocabulary since the nineteenth century. As the Time Magazine corpus demonstrates, the word was a low frequency item until the 1990s, when its numbers rocketed. The popular 1995 movie Clueless, an Alicia Silverstone vehicle, reflected and encouraged the rapid extension of the word into the street lingo of young people.

Hundreds of website authors think the word that came so easily to our tongues in the 1990s is “cueless.” This substitution has a plausible semantic foundation: someone who continues to have no clue when the evidence is staring them in the face is clearly missing a cue.

The word “cue” with the meaning of signal or hint first appeared in its native context, the domain of the theater, in the sixteenth century. The precise occasion for its coinage is not known. Writers in the seventeenth century, says the OED, speculated the word may have been taken from some Latin word beginning with the letter “q” that was used in the margins of scripts to mark the place where actors should begin their lines.

“Cueless,” of course, can be a word in its own right. Thomas Carlyle used it in the early 1800s to refer to a person without a pigtail (i.e., “queue-less”). The web hints at another meaning that dictionaries have not yet noticed: the state of being without a pool cue. And then, of course, there is the cueless actor who needs a line and can’t get it. This last “cueless” is also missing from official lexicons. It seems unlikely that these minor cases of legitimate reference can account for the large number of examples “cueless” on the web. The occurrence of the word in canned phrases such as “cueless about” and “totally cueless” also points toward an eggcorn interpretation. And despite the occasional employment of the substitution for punning purposes, most users of the word “cueless” are, well, clueless that they have warped the semantics of a good word.

Perhaps we have here another brick in the wall of semantic perversions that led Cicero to lament in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar :

Indeed, it is a strange-disposèd time:
But men may construe things after their fashion
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

Three examples of “cueless”:

Poker forum: “since you made it to the forums you can’t be completely cueless....”

Techie blog comment: “Lucent has been absolutely cueless over the last three years. ”

Comment on a religion blog: “You obviously know nothing about Bob Coy or Billy Graham…and seen to be cueless about matters of the Holy Spirit.”