Words of the Month - Parasites and Other People

         Since a particular parasite has unfortunately been much in the news lately, it seems a good time to look at the bright side of parasite, which is the word’s interesting etymology.  English acquired the word in the 1530s from Greek.  The roots mean literally “beside+bread/food,” and the word referred in Greek antiquity to a person who’s always eating at someone else’s table, living at someone else’s expense, and especially mooching off a rich person by kissing up to them without providing any actual benefit.  This is the same meaning parasite first had in English, too: “hanger-on, toady,” and not for another two centuries did it come to refer scientifically to a plant or animal that lives at the expense of another, like our current too-close companion cyclospora.  This is really interesting to me, because I always assumed that the animals living on unwilling hosts were the first parasites, and that it was metaphorical to call a human sponger a parasite.  In fact, it’s the reverse – and parasite may not be the only word with a history in which human descriptors were applied metaphorically to animals.

        The word shrimp first appeared in English in the fourteenth century, and it’s not entirely clear which came first in English: the tasty marine crustacean or the puny person.  Either way, though, it comes from Old Norse or Middle German words for “a skinny, shriveled person,” so it described humans first, and was applied to the little critter by extension.

        Shark is another word that’s got murky origins.  We don’t know which definition came first, but in the late sixteenth century we get both “large, fierce fish” and “cheat, person who preys on others.”  It may come from a German word for “villain, scoundrel,” in which case it was a person first.  (But if ocean sharks weren’t called “villains” until the late sixteenth century, what were they called before that?  Small sharks were called houndfish (or dogfish), and there was also haye, which is cognate with the other Germanic languages.)

        A mutt was not a “mongrel, non-purebred canine” until about 1910, although before that it was simply a stupid dog – or a stupid person.  It is thought to be a shortening of muttonhead, which was an insult indicating “a stupid person” by 1803.

        On the other hand, sometimes etymologies that go the other way surprise me, too.  The word chubby meaning “plump,” dates back to around 1610 and apparently actually derives from a particular kind of river fish which is rather stocky.  The word chub appears in English as the name of the fish in the mid-fifteenth century, and its origin is unknown.  It was then used metaphorically of plump people (and earlier also meaning “lazy person,”) before the adjective form was developed.

        What I find really fun about these unexpected developments in meaning, is that they demonstrate how versatile we are about constantly coming up with fresh new metaphorical ways to describe the things around us.

[Pictures: Prawn, linoprint by Jane Evans (Image from Jane Evans Gyotaku);

Chub, woodcut from The Treasury of Natural History by Samuel Maunder, 1852 (Image from University of California Libraries).]