Of the mallygolder and the dumbledore

I am an enthusiastic collector of words of all kinds, and also a keen reader of the magazine British Wildlife, a serious publication, but one without serious academic pretensions.  So you can read quite learned articles about identifying a particular class of beetles, or about conservation techniques, or about the species affected by global warming.  Or, as in the last issue, you can read about "the folk-names of invertebrates"!

This is a wonderful treasure trove of ancient words, most obsolete or of at least extremely restricted usage, but some still common - and many deserving of resuscitation!  The 'mallygolder' for example is a Cornish word for a jellyfish, and the 'dumbledore' is a dialect word for a bumblebee.  And as you cross the country (England, I mean) from Devon to the Thames valley and up to the north, the woodlouse changes from ' zow-pig' to 'chisel-pig' and then to 'slater'; and if instead of travelling in space, we travelled in time, they would be called 'chisleps' or 'esselchans'.  Other names for the same creature include 'bibble bug', 'cheesy-bob' and 'pissibed'.  What a lexicon for a small and unregarded crustacean.

The earwig is another with many names - many of them stubbornly clinging to the ridiculous notion that they entered the human ear and casued serious damage, a belief reflected in medical textbooks for many years.  They are 'forkie-tails' in Scotland, or 'gallochs', which means the same in Gaelic.  And in Elizabethan England, it was dreaded under the name of 'twitch-ballock' from its predilection for the warmth and humidity of the codpiece.

I could go on - dragonflies are 'devil's darning needles', and the garden snail is the 'hodmandod', and starfish were 'cassock'cats' or 'devil's hands', but the last insect I want to focus on is the charming flying beetle we all known as ladybirds - 'Our Lady's Bird', the bird of the Virgin Mary.  The venereal term, or group name, is also wonderful - 'a loveliness' of ladybirds.  But they were also called 'clock-ladies' from the belief that they flew from your finger in the direction of the hour (with 12 at due north) - and no-one knows why they have to fly home, 'because your house is burning down and your children gone'.

Comments

[glo]

Oh! I have just found an explanation for the name cassock'cat! Should I dare saying it publicly? Maybe it could be because starfish use to hide under rocks, or plants, or even in the sand... just like a cat could be found napping under the cassock of a priest. Well, I will stop here or somebody out there might feel very, very offended!

[glo]

Very interesting. I quite understand why a starfish could be called a devil's hand; it has 5 points and when you cut one of them, it grows a new one to replace the missing one. Then, I imagine that was something really puzzling for our ancestors (well, yours at least) and something that only the devil could achieve. I don't know if this is the right explanation though. On the other hand -so to speak, the name cassock'cat remains still mysterious for me.

I heard a few weeks ago that the Beatles first chose the name Beetles to name themselves, and finally John Lennon replaced the second "e" with an "a", making it a reference to their rather beating rythms.

[Dark Puss]

Britsh Wildlife is great! I think such publications are sadly too rare. It is easy to write populist and it's easy to write expert esoterica, but to pull-off non-academic serious is a real challenge. I have only tried a couple of times and it was very difficult for me anyway.

[Pamela]

The "devil's darning needle". I love that.