Part of Speech: Noun Notes: Rudyard Kipling must have been the
last English speaker to use today's word as anything other than
a name. He did so in his poem, The Ballad of East and West,
which begins: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the
twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's
great Judgment Seat." The phrase, "never the twain shall meet,"
however, has found a permanent place among our idiomatic
phrases. In Play: The most famous play on this word was made by
perhaps the greatest word-player of us all, Samuel Clemens. As a
boy, Clemens rode steamboats up and down the Mississippi, where
sailing was safe in water two fathoms or more deep. The river
boatmen who checked the depth would call out "mark twain" to
alert the captain when their two-fathom-long lines struck
bottom. He took that phrase as his pseudonym, Mark Twain. Word
History: PIE dwo- "two", which underlies today's word, shows up
in Russian and Serbian dva, German zwei, Latin duo, French deux,
Spanish dos, Portuguese