Ettercap, Ettercop, Cobweb, Spiderweb

 These things are all related. Check out the whole Wordsmith entry for it:

This week’s theme
Words with hidden animals

This week’s words
auspicate
ettercap

The Crying Spider, 1881

Art: Odilon Redon

ettercap or attercop

PRONUNCIATION:

(ET-uhr-kap or AT-uhr-kop)

MEANING:

noun:
1. A bad-tempered or spiteful person.
2. A spider.

 

ETYMOLOGY:

A variant of attercop, from Old English attorcoppa, from ator (poison, venom) + coppa (spider). It’s the same element that shows up in cobweb, literally spider’s web. Earliest documented use: before 1525.

NOTES:

If you know someone who is always spinning webs of gossip or ready to bite your head off, this is the perfect label for them. The form attercop got a modern boost from J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins uses it to taunt the giant, venomous spiders of Mirkwood, and the insult works. No spider, Tolkien tells us, has ever liked being called attercop.

USAGE:

“At least we can see the auld ettercap into the ground now, Christ be praised.”
Pat McIntosh; The Counterfeit Madam; Constable; 2011.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead. -Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (21 Jul 1899-1961)