No 10 was this week trying to find a “legal loophole” in the act of parliament forbidding a no-deal Brexit. But why is it a loophole and not just, well, a hole?

If you are imagining the hole defined by a loop of thread, congratulations on your meditative image of Zen nothingness, but actually we need the old sense of “loop” that means a hole in a wall: either for a window, or for shooting arrows from. (Probably from the old Dutch for lying in wait.) Thus the first recorded “loop-hole” in English appears in The Arte of Warre (1591) written by a soldier named William Garrard, who advises that a builder of military defences should “beware that in hys parapettes, he make no windows nor loope holes” that could let in artillery shot.

Only in the late 17th century did “loophole” also become a way of escaping some situation – perhaps, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, from a different Dutch word meaning to run. Neither sense, then, is very flattering: either the loophole-seeker is fleeing in cowardice, or he thinks he is being very clever in shooting out through his opening, without realising it is making him a target.