Holy Cow!

by Boze Hadleigh

  Computer-wise, a worm is a detrimentally self-replicating program. To worm one’s way in is to sneak or crawl in, usually with ill intention; to worm something out of someone is to do so by underhanded means.

  Metaphorically, a worm’s eye view is the lowest or humblest possible vantage point.

  Shakespeare wrote, “The worm has turned,” indicating a reversal of fortune. The phrase generally refers to a turnabout situation favoring the less powerful party, such as an employee versus an employer. It can also mean somebody meek or weak has become bold or strong.

  To open a can of worms is to commence or pursue a subject that proves worse or more distasteful than one presumed.

  Worm is a part of the names of several machine components, for instance, a wormwheel is the wheel of a worm gear. Worm gears are driven by a steam engine. Worm is also used to describe some worm-shaped items (like gummy worms) and creatures, usually parasitic.

  A worm cast is a twistingly coiled mass of mud, soil, or sand thrown up to the surface by a burrowing worm.

  Nautically, to worm is to smooth a rope by winding thread between its strands.

  In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical connection between vastly separated areas of space-time.

  A worm lizard is a reptile which, like a worm, is subterranean, burrows, is blind, segmented, and limbless. Interestingly, in many fairy tales worm is interchangeable with dragon—that is, a big worm (think Dune).

  Woodworm, Wormwood. . .

  A woodworm isn’t a worm—it’s the wood-boring larva of a furniture beetle. Woodworm is also the negative condition of wood damaged by this larva. Worm-eaten also describes the holes made by this non-worm. Likewise, a bookworm—not the well-read human type—is the larva of another wood-boring beetle that feeds off the paper and glue in books.

  Wormwood also has nothing to do with worms. It’s a bitter-tasting shrub used in the making of vermouth, absinthe, and certain medicines. (Vermouth’s name is from the German Vermut, or wormwood.) Wormseed is a plant whose seeds can be used in treating parasitic-worm infestations.

  Ringworm isn’t a worm, but an itchy, contagious skin disease of the scalp or feet caused by fungi. A hookworm is an actual worm, a parasite that latches onto the wall of the intestines using hooklike mouthparts.

  Nor is a shipworm a worm, but a mollusk related to clams that leaves telltale holes made through hard cellulose fibers.

  Vermin

  Vermicelli is a fine pasta. In Italian it means little worms. In Britain, vermicelli are chocolate shreds used for decorating cakes.

  The Latin for worm is vermis, for little worm vermiculus. From the former derives our word vermin. From the latter, the red shade vermilion, via a small Mediterranean insect which when crushed yields a brilliant red dye. The insect’s modern name, kermes, originated the red-shade names crimson and carmine.

  Vermicular means worm-shaped or relating to intestinal worms. Vermiculated signifies worm-eaten or marked with undulating lines.

  Vermiculite is an unusual brown or yellow mineral sometimes used for thermal insulation that, when it expands because of heat, emits shapes resembling small worms!

  Vermifuge is a medicine that gets rid of parasitic worms and of course vermicide is a substance that kills worms. (Which recalls the old rhyme: By the sewer he lived, by the sewer he died; they said it was murder, but it was sewer-cide.)

  Spiders

  “‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.” Neither insects nor “bugs,” spiders are arachnids—the family includes scorpions and ticks—with eight legs and eight eyes that spin webs to capture insect prey. They help keep the vermin population down yet have an unsavory reputation. A few reasons: they’re considered awfully hairy (especially close-up), are thought poisonous (most aren’t), and the fear of the female black widow spider (deadlier than the male). At least their webs are beautiful.

  A spider is also a long-legged rest for a billiard cue that may be positioned above a ball without touching it.

  In Britain, a spider keeps a load in place on a vehicle via a set of radiating elastic ties.

  Computerwise, spider is another name for crawler, a program that scans the Internet so it can create an index of data.

  A spider mite is a tiny plant-feeding mite said, via magnification, to resemble a small spider.

  A spider monkey is a South American monkey with an especially long tail and limbs.

  A spider plant is a member of the lily family with long, thin leaves striped yellow and native to South Africa.

  Spiderwort is an American plant whose flowers have long hairy stamens—the fertilizing male organs of flowers. (Wort, which haplessly sounds like wart, simply indicates a plant or herb formerly used as food or medicine, e.g., butterwort.)

  The Spider King was the sobriquet of 15th-century monarch Louis XI, whose web of plots and spies enmeshed France. His paranoia was partly fed by the cowardly and corrupt legacy of his father Charles VII, whom Joan of Arc had virtually made king before he allowed her to be burned at the stake.

  Two spidery expressions are “to blow the cobwebs away,” meaning to void one’s mind of old-fashioned ideas, and “to be at the center of the spider’s web”—to control a complex group or operation.

  FYI, the biggest spider is the female Goliath Tarantula of South America, whose leg span is ten inches, the size of a dinner plate. The smallest spider is the male Patu Digua, whose body is smaller than a pinhead.

  Cobweb

  Back when it was thought all spiders were poisonous they were called, in Olde English, attercoppes, meaning poison head. So the spun creation of a spider was a copweb. With time and imprecise pronunciation, it became cobweb.

  Spider comes from Olde English spinnan, to draw out and twist fiber, also the source of spin (spider in German is Spinne). The word is used in names of other creatures usually distinguished by long, thin legs, like the sea spider and spider crab.

  Spiders’ worst enemies are other spiders. Yes, they’re cannibals and can get caught in each other’s webs. Pirate spiders prey exclusively on fellow spiders.

  Tarantism

  Talk about a dancing fool. Tarantism is a psychological malady consisting of an extreme impulse to dance. This condition, most prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to 17th centuries, was thought to be caused by the bite of a tarantula, an impressively large, hairy spider sometimes known as the wolf spider in southern Europe and also found in the subtropical Americas. It was named after the Italian seaport of Taranto, which also gave its name to tarantism.

  A possible cure for the above was the southern Italian dance called the Tarantella—after the tarantula, which was wrongly believed poisonous (most are not). Gina Lollobrigida, who performed the dance with a beribboned tambourine in a memorable episode of the 1980s nighttime TV soap Falcon Crest, explained, “It is a fast dance. You whirl and spin . . . it is graceful but very fast and tiring, and if you do it correctly, it will remove all the poisons from inside you. It leaves you healthy and strong.”

  Conversely, many people at the benighted time believed the Tarantella was the result of the terpsichorean illness, that it was the one dance the afflicted couldn’t help breaking into.

  Vinegaroons, found in Texas and the American South, are similar to tarantulas but smell like vinegar when they’re crushed.

  A once-popular nickname for whiskey was tarantula juice. Bottoms down!

  Bugs

  The word bug, which covers a host of tiny creatures, is of unknown origin.

  How cute is a bug in a rug? Sometimes the media—or in the past, famous columnists—like to reverse meanings or substitute words. In the 1940s the phrase was “snug as a bug in a rug.” Somebody substituted cute for snug, and it took.

  “Cute as a June bug” flatters the chafer, a large beetle that often flies in June.

  Having or getting a bug may denote enthusiasm, for example, “She’s caught the acting bug.”

  A bug can be a hidden microphone, as when spies or go
vernment agencies bug a telephone. A bug is also a microorganism that’s caused an illness, as in “I must have caught a bug.” A bug may be an error in a computer program or system, and bug off (sometimes buzz off) means go away!

  Bugbane is a tall plant with fernlike leaves once used to eliminate bedbugs. (Bane comes from bana, a Germanic word for poison.)

  Various words with bug in them, like bugger, baby buggy, etc., have naught to do with insects.

  When commercials feature bugs or insects as themselves, the public usually reacts adversely. But when bugs have been given individual, human-seeming—albeit nasty—personalities, as in ads for Bardahl automotive products or Raid insecticide, they’ve helped boost sales. In the 1950s when the US government started its anti-litter campaign, their mascot was the litterbug, a roguish-looking creature wearing an eye patch, with a cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth.

  Cricket

  The British game wasn’t named after the insect related to the grasshopper but with shorter legs. The expression it’s not cricket, meaning not fair, is from the game, which existed by the 1300s. Among the first to use the expression were the townsmen of Boxgrove, England, who in 1622 were prosecuted for playing the game on a Sunday.

  The insect’s onomatopoeic name comes from Old French criquer, to crackle, supposedly imitative of the musical chirping sound a male cricket makes. To be as merry or chirpy or lively as a cricket reflects human perception of what has been called the happiest insect. Jiminy Cricket all but stole the animated feature Pinocchio from its eponymous protagonist and had his own hit song, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

  Jiminy Cricket is a minced oath, that is, an exclamation in which one or more words have substituted for a word that’s taboo or considered sacred. Thus, “Jiminy Cricket!” in place of Jesus Christ!

  The expression to be knee-high to a grasshopper—or a duck—means since somebody was a small child or as tall as a small child.

  If you’ve wondered whether male crickets’ legs get sore or chapped from rubbing together so much, they don’t. Their legs are made of hardy material similar to our fingernails. The chaps’ legs can wear down eventually, but do grow back.

  Crazy Bugs

  Bughouse derives from a flea-infested hotel that could drive a person crazy. By the 1940s the term was being used in novels to mean a psychiatric hospital or lunatic asylum or somebody who was crazy, often under the influence of drugs.

  Buggy also came to mean nuts or very disturbed. Besides alliteration, that wascally Warner Bros. wabbit was named Bugs Bunny partly because he was goofy and sometimes went off his rocker. Alliteration applies to many cartoon characters’ names, regardless of the language. For instance in Spanish Donald Duck is el Pato Pascual, pato meaning duck.

  A bugaboo is related to a bugbear, something that causes great fear or is used to scare children, from the obsolete word bogey or bug, possibly of Celtic origin and referring to the devil.

  To have the jitters is to be nervous or move irregularly. Parents in the 1940s were often nervous about the movements involved in the jitterbug, a fast dance performed to swing music that took young America by storm.

  A fire-bug is someone who compulsively watches or sets fires. The use of bug in this term expresses mental obsession.

  To bug someone—non-mechanically—is to be irksome, a pest, driving them to distraction.

  (Ask your friends which animal causes more human deaths every year than any other? They’ll usually guess snakes, sharks, lions, tigers, mad dogs, etc., none of which come close to: the mosquito.)

  Canapés

  Contrary to the Three Stooges’ Curly, canapés are not a can of peas, but elegant appetizers, usually served on a cracker or melba toast. In French, canapé means sofa. What’s that got to do with animals?

  The Greek word for mosquito was konops. A konopeion was a primitive mosquito net—curtains hung around a sofa or a piece of furniture to recline on. In Latin this was adapted to conopeum, in medieval Latin to canopeum, in Middle English to canope, then finally our canopy (which is atop rather than around a bed, not sofa). The French used canapé to describe the sofa, not the curtains. And where do guests usually eat a canapé? On a sofa—or chair.

  Since only female mosquitoes eat blood, what do male mosquitoes live on? Nectar, which is what all mosquitoes eat most of the time. Only a female has the biting mouth-part to pierce human or animal skin. The amount of blood she draws is scarcely missed by a human but may be greater than her body weight. The lipids in blood are converted into protein and iron that increase her fecundity. After a meal of nectar, she can lay five or ten eggs; after blood, 200.

  Pests. . .

  A pest is a destructive insect or any other animal that harms human food, crops, or livestock. Also an annoying person who pesters you. Its origin is the Latin pestis, plague (in French, one of Albert Camus’s best-known novels is La Peste, The Plague).

  A pest-house used to be a hospital for people with infectious diseases, particularly the plague. Pestiferous means harboring infection and disease. Pestilence is a fatal epidemic, especially bubonic plague. And a pesticide is something that hopefully offs pests.

  A tick is a very small parasitic arachnid that latches onto skin in order to draw blood. The expression full as a tick refers to it becoming bloated with blood, much heavier than before its meal. In Britain a tick is a worthless or disreputable person—often a parasite.

  A nit is the egg or young of a louse, and in Britain a stupid person. The 1961 novel Marnie (from which Hitchcock made a memorable movie) used the then-common expression as nervous as a nit about its larcenous—but far from stupid—protagonist. To nit-pick is to fault-find about details as tiny as a nit.

  A rare non-negative insect phrase is “to put out feelers”—to try and gauge others’ opinions or feelings before making a decision.

  Lice

  Lice is the plural of louse. There are many kinds, but basically a louse is a small parasitic insect. When a louse is a lousy or contemptible person, the plural is louses, as when Marilyn Monroe sings “It’s then that those louses go back to their spouses” in the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Oddly, in German a male may affectionately call his girlfriend meine kleine Lausbube, my little louse baby.

  Lice can’t fly or jump, so with their six legs they cling to human hair and suck blood, biting through the scalp. The amount is miniscule, but the lice then lay eggs that hatch in eight to ten days, then become adults in a week to ten days—a louse lives about a month. Besides head lice, which occur most often in children, there are pubic lice, usually sexually transmitted and also known as crabs, and body lice from poor hygiene, often called cooties, a word that originated during the First World War, possibly from the Malay kutu, a parasitic biting insect.

  Soldiers helped popularize the negative adjective lousy (which came from infested with lice), also to be lousy with something, that is, to have a lot of it—e.g., “She’s lousy with sex appeal”—plus louse meaning somebody unliked. After WWII all three terms became popular with American teenagers, then the first and third worked their way into general usage, especially the first.

  A louse fly (rhymes with house fly) is a flattened bloodsucking fly that spends much or most of its life on a single host.

  Lousewort is an herbaceous plant that’s partly parasitic and was formerly thought to harbor lice.

  A Fly in the Ointment

  Many centuries ago it was believed a single fly in the ointment spoiled the medicinal whole and robbed it of its efficacy. The Bible’s Ecclesiastes (10:1) says, “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour.” Discovering a fly, living or dead, was more serious then because remedies hardly ever came in individual portions, but in huge vats that could treat a hundred or more people.

  A Flea in One’s Ear

  John Lyly was a popular Elizabethan writer who in 1579 published Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit. It included a vignette in which an aristocrat chastise
s a servant: “Ferardo . . . whispering Philautus in his eare (who stoode as though he had a flea in his eare), desired him to keepe silence.” The analogy was a dog with an actual flea in its ear, shaking its head in annoyance.

  Another analogy was fleas trapped in the armor of ancient knights. Discomfort was again implied, but the eventual meaning was to tell somebody off. (Georges Feydeau’s raucous 1907 French farce is titled A Flea in Her Ear.)

  Flea Circus

  Piqued by the jumping prowess of fleas, people have trained them for millennia. A flea can jump up to 12 inches, 150 times its length; for a human, that’s equivalent to jumping over 800 feet. Flea circuses began in England in the 1600s and peaked in popularity during the 1830s when Signo Bertolotto toured Europe with his performing fleas that danced, pulled coaches, and actually wore costumes. Swiss watchmakers created teeny circus vehicles for the fleas.

  But it wasn’t all merriment, for the fleas were permanently glued to each other or to the miniscule chains with which they pulled wagons (fleas can pull 160,000 times their own weight, comparable to a human pulling 12,000 tons).

  In time, flea circuses became popular at county fairs throughout the US. Though rare, they still exist, the creatures no longer glued to one another or to props. One way of training fleas is with tuning forks, using frequencies pleasant and unpleasant to fleas. Most flea circuses used human fleas; most have been replaced with cat fleas. In recent years San Francisco, Winston-Salem (NC), and Providence (RI) have boasted popular flea circuses.

  Dogs are unwelcome at performances because flea owners fear losing their star attractions.

  Fleas

  Fleas are wingless jumping insects that live on the blood of birds and mammals, including cats and dogs, thus the flea collar. Few species bother humans, though over 250 kinds are found in North America. “Flea” is of Germanic origin.