Cobwebs, Curfews and Buying the Farm: Words that Make You Go Hmmmm
Do you ever have that moment when you just stop and look at a word and think… How? Why? As in, how did you even come into existence?
Why is a spiderweb known as a cobweb? What kind of weird word is curfew? And how on earth did “buying the farm” become synonymous with death? Surely this is not keeping anyone up at night, but, you’ve got to admit you’re a little bit curious, right? Curious enough to keep skimming through this post? I hope so.
Cobwebs
OK, let’s start with cobweb. What’s with the “cob”? Our answer takes us back to Old English. (Old English is said to fall anywhere between the 5th and 12th centuries.) Our translation would be coppewebbe, meaning spiderweb. So, the webbe part isn’t exactly hard to discern as our modern word “web.” Fun fact about web? Glad you asked. Web used to be a more generic word for netting. People with the last name “Webster” generally worked as weavers; ergo, the Merriam-Webster dictionary peeps were likely once weavers way back in the day.
Back to coppe. In Old English, coppe meant head. Some people suspect that that’s where “corncob” or a “head of corn” came from. Scholars think the double “p” was replaced with a “b” somewhere in the 16th century. Now all we’ve got for coppeweb is a “head web”. Not helpful. OK, well here’s the key. Apparently, the Old English word for spider was atorcoppe. Ator translated as “poison,” and as we know, coppe meant “head.”
My translation: The damned poison head with 8 legs that bites you is our friend the spider. Later, cob became a standalone word for spider in many dialects, but, that too eventually died out. Apparently, J.R.R. Tolkien busted out “cob” for spider in The Hobbit in 1937. That seems to be the last well-known record of it.
How did we get from cob to spider in modern English? Well, the word spyder existed, and it meant “the spinner.” Makes sense. Spiders spin some crazy-intricate webs. Spyder became more popular in Middle English (11th to the 16th century) and has remained so until today.
My own random theory regarding the usage of the two phrases (cobweb vs. spiderweb) is that we’ve relegated cobwebs to dusty old houses, attics and Halloween. I think we use spider webs more specifically for when we see a spider (or the prey caught in the web), or we know we’re in a spider-infested area, room, or otherwise.
Curfew
“Be home by 11,” my mom shouted as I flew out the door. Ah yes, the curfew. Did you have one and argue about it?
Now let’s head on over to France in the Middle Ages. Fire was your source of light and heat. At a certain time each night (say 8 or 9pm) in the towns and cities, fires had to be extinguished for safety. Houses were made of wood and often situated very closed together. When fires broke out, they were deadly and destructive. To avoid this, an appointed person would ring a bell throughout the area to signal the time to extinguish fires. This time became known as cuevrefeu in the Old French, meaning to literally “cover fire.” Cuevre is the imperative form of the verb covrir, which means to cover. Feu means fire.
Today, we know curfews as restricting movement in public after a certain time, regardless of whether we’re at war and it applies to an entire city, or just your average teenager. According to Merriam-Webster, “even when hearth fires were no longer regulated, many towns had other rules that called for the ringing of an evening bell, and this signal was still called coverfeu. A common coverfeu regulation required people to be off the streets by a given time. That was the meaning of the word when it was borrowed into Middle English as curfew.”
Buy the Farm
Poor Aunt Sadie bought the farm. She died. It’s a commonly known and rather odd expression that seems to have lost its context. It’s kind of crass and definitely morbid, but can be funny (if the deceased person you’re referring to it’s not someone close to you). There are a surprising number of theories out there on the origins of this expression. They all seem to originate with World War I or WWII on the British or American side.
Some think the phrase originated from the British slang phrases “buy it,” “buy one,” or “buy a packet.” Because they’re Brits and nearly everything is ironic or an understatement, “buying” it or one referred to something that a person would never actually want to buy. A “packet” in fact, referred to a bullet, so if you bought a packet, you were wounded or dead. To me, it sounds a bit like our American phrase to “bite it” or “bite the dust.” I was jogging along the trail and all of the sudden, I bit it. I tripped. I fell. Or, if you’re more into cowboy phrases, you might refer to someone dying as having bitten the dust. (Think of a shoot-out in a old dusty, western town in the 1800s).
Another theory says that when all the boys and men went to war, the farmers lost their best and most productive workers. The people remaining (older men, those unfit for service and women) often had to leverage the farm to make ends meet by taking out a mortgage against it. It was said that the average cost of a farm was somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand dollars. This not so coincidentally was the range of insurance money a fallen soldier’s family would be compensated upon his death. This insurance money literally “bought the farm back” for the soldier’s family. So, when a solider fell, the phrase came to pass that he “bought the farm.”
Some trace the phrase back to the United States Air Force in the 1950s. There are a few variations.
Some say that when a plane crashed into a farm or field in Europe, the land owners were compensated for the damages. The pilot, having paid his life, literally “bought the farm” for the family who owned the farm (and most likely had to mortgage it to survive).
Sometimes, there were unexploded ammunition in the field rendering it too dangerous to continue to live on. The money then went to the family to move and the government literally bought the farm.
Often the pilot was buried where he crashed, so he “bought” the plot or lot where his body rested.
Others say that pilots used to dream about retirement and settling down on a nice, quiet farm. When the pilot died, his comrades would say he bought that farm, meaning he had permanently retired.
C’mon admit it… words and their etymology are fun. And even if you can’t remember the exact details of what made “curfew” so interesting and historic at your next party, you can at least tell someone to go look it up because it’s worth the Google time.
Which weird words or phrases make you go hmmmm? Sleep tight? The buck stops here? Riff-raff? Let me know in the comments below.
_____
Sources
Cobwebs
Buy the Farm
Curfew