BREXIT boils down to snake oil sales. A few weeks ago, former Cabinet Secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell complained at the way Brexiteers dismissed the forecasts which predict that leaving the EU will cause economic harm by saying: “If you are selling snake oil, you don’t like the idea of experts testing your products…”

This week, Brexit Secretary David Davis upped the snake oil stakes. He dismissed Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to create a customs union by saying: “If it looks like snake oil, and it smells like snake oil, don’t expect it to make you feel better…”

But both sides clearly forget that snake oil did originally work.

In the 1860s, the Americans hired tens of thousands of cheap Chinese peasants to dig the 3,000km Transcontinental Railroad from Nebraska to San Francisco. After a hard day’s digging, the peasants rubbed a Chinese snake oil liniment into their aching limbs. It worked so well that the Americans started making their own.

However, the peasants’ embrocation was made from Chinese Water Snakes; the American copyists couldn’t get such exotic creatures and so they boiled up Rattlesnakes. What no one knew at the time was that Chinese Water Snakes are rich in Omega 3 acids which act as an anti-inflammatory but Rattlesnakes are not.

The self-proclaimed “king of the Rattlesnakes” was Clark Stanley. At the 1890 Chicago World Exposition – which is where the idea for the Great Exhibition of the North came from – he extravagantly boiled live rattlesnakes in front of the crowds who flocked to buy the snake oil they had seen created.

However, despite Stanley’s claims to have learned his snaky skills from Hopi medicine men, in 1917, federal investigators analysed the contents of his bottles of snake oil and discovered that they contained a little beef fat, colouring from red peppers and turpentine. There was no snake oil in Stanley’s Snake Oil.

He was fined $20 for “misbranding” and the reputation of snake oil salesmen slid to an all time low. Indeed, only the reputation of a Brexit negotiator is lower.

LAST week’s column was about the many possible derivations of the name of the former Aclet pub in Bishop Auckland. Why Aclet?

John Carter in Darlington responded, and since reading his letter I’ve been overflowing with excitement about learning the name of an item that I’d previously thought too insignificant to warrant having its own name even though, as I sit here in my snowboots, I have four of them dangling from my feet.

John wrote: “I have always known an aclet to be the piece on the end of a shoelace.”

He’s very nearly right. The hard bit at the end of a shoelace, which binds all the fibres together so that the lace can be easily poked through the eyelet, is “an aglet”. It comes from an Old French word “aguillette” which meant “little needle”. An aguillette was a cord fastener which attached a soldier’s armour to his clothing, but the English adapted the word for their own uses – according to the dictionary, in 1365 an agletmaker was first recorded as an occupation.

However, not everyone has been so impressed with my theories about “aclet”.

“My husband, Edwin, says all of them are nonsense,” wrote Elsie Watson, from Aycliffe Village. “An aclet is quite simply a small ac.”