Lend me your ear(wig)

Once believed to be adept at entering our ears so as to lay eggs in the brain, sending us mad, no creature was more unfairly condemned by its name than the earwig, laments Ian Morton

- Ian Morton

THE children learned the song at Mrs Kiddy’s Barnardiston pre-prep school in Suffolk and it became a party piece. ‘I’m very fond of earwigs, they have such shiny backs, as if the day is raining and they are wearing macs. They hide in gay nasturtiums and all that I can see is just a little pointy tail a-wiggling at me. My granny screams in horror whenever one comes near. She says that it is trying to climb into her ear. But I know that’s all silly, for they are much too wise to choose such a hidey-hole in which to spend their lives.’

Infant voices thus dismissed one of the oldest myths in the insect world—and possibly the first myth to determine an insect’s name, for it comes directly from the Old English for ear (eare) and insect or beetle (wicga). An old name for an old creature—its fossilised ancestry dates back some 208 million years. The name translates literally in most European languages, as in the French perceoreille, the Dutch oorworm and the German ohrwurm, demonstrating that the belief in its invasive quest was continent-wide. It was mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s natural history of AD77, his counsel being to spit into the affected orifice, a kind companion, presumably, being enlisted to administer the cure. Advice in the 11th-century, Anglo-Saxon Old English Herbarium, a translation of a 5th-century Latin text, was to ‘take the big great windelstraw with two edges, which grows on highways, chew it into the ear, and he will soon be off’.

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