clew's reviews: a book log

earwig

I thought it was funny that every English-speaking small kid apparently knows that earwigs will crawl into your ear and nest in your brain. (How about other languages?) I was astonished to find that the name is from the Old English for "ear-wriggle", and that the OED quotes Sax. Leechd., from ca. 1000 AD (as far as HTML entities will take us):

Wiþ earwicgan, genim þæt micle greate windel streaw twyecge...ceop on þæt eare he bið of sona.

which sounds to me like advice from the ancients on what we should do about earwig attacks. I wish I knew what it meant. The OED does also offer a later translation of Pliny, which says that if you spit into an earwig-infested ear, the earwig will come forth 'anon'; and The English Physitian suggests dropping in hemp-juice.

I did find a very helpful page on Old English on the Web. Note that making usable fonts would have been much harder if not for the similarity to living Icelandic. Old English fonts make the quote look even better, although I don't know if I've ruined the spelling:

My six-year-old self would have been cheered by so potent a charm against the pest.

So wrote clew in Word. | TrackBack