Etymology Entomology

I think I was maybe 5 years old or a bit less. My grandmother, who had had children young and so was much younger and prettier than most grandmothers (she looked like Sophia Loren) was out to babysit me for a while as my parents went on a business trip. Being under grandma’s care was always initially exciting and then rapidly grew tiring and frustrating for me, because, as best I could put it in my childhood vocabulary, this grandma was “weird.”

She would perpetually say things that even as a small child I could tell were not to be believed. Eating bread crusts makes your hair curly. Don’t touch your bellybutton or your stomach will explode. Your grandpa’s new wife is a witch. When she got old, people thought she had dementia; I had to explain that she was always like this. 

So when she later saw me outside in the garden examining some rollie-pollies that I’d found under a rock, she absolutely flipped out and told me not to touch them because they would burrow under my fingernails and eat my heart. 

This statement topped the list of the stupidest things I’d yet heard in my young life. Putting aside the anatomical issues in her claim, I successfully argued with her about the nature of rollie-pollies and my certainty that these were perfectly harmless, inoffensive bugs more interested in curling into little balls (hence their name) than in any of this HBO horror movie material she was on about. She finally conceded, saying she had confused them with centipedes – those, she insisted, were the real heart-eaters. Her proof? She said her sister had a scar from one that got into her leg. (I suppose the missing heart wasn’t enough to merit mention?)

Since grandma had thoroughly discredited her entomology skills by that point, I didn’t think about the claim too much; especially as the area where I grew up didn’t have any centipedes to fret about. 

Years later, in middle school, I had a gray-haired substitute teacher who was killing time by telling stories about her traditional New Mexican upbringing. It included a recollection about how she got a tick in her scalp while gathering piñon, which then led to a story about – I couldn’t believe it, this was the second time I ever heard it – a centipede that had been living in her ankle and had to be removed, still alive, by a doctor. She described it as very small, indicating something not larger than a dime.

Now by age 13 I knew perfectly well that centipedes are not parasitic. We don’t even need to get into this question. They sell the things at pet stores along with the reptiles, they’re not going to do that if handling it will make it burrow into your flesh and kill you. They’d have to at least put a disclaimer on the little glass tank about that.

Troublingly, this centipede story was less of an urban legend than a rural legend. In consequence, to find out more about this crazy notion isn’t easy, because it isn’t well documented. These two accounts are the only times I’ve heard it, and yet both the storytellers swear they saw this scientifically impossible phenomenon with their own two eyes. At one point I tried contacting a local historian/folklorist about this strange regional myth. She unhelpfully told me to “do an Internet [sic] search to find out if centipedes are indeed parasitic.” 

I was clearly on my own for this. Where to start? Grandma couldn’t tell the difference between a centipede and a rollie-pollie, so, maybe this was a case of misidentification? Perhaps another parasitic bug is being confused with centipedes?

Knowing that both grandma and the substitute teacher tended to speak Spanish at home in their youths, I began by inquiring with grandma as to what the word for centipede was in Spanish. Prone to distort facts as always, grandma gave me not the word she’d have used in her youth, but the one she’d learned more recently from watching television channels out of Mexico (different dialect, rendering the information useless.)

I checked a 19th century Spanish-English dictionary and found the variant cientopiés, where it was defined as “a wood louse.” That is another name for our rollie-pollie. Note that the “louse” part of the name implies something parasitic, even though wood lice are not so. Also in the English-Spanish section of that same dictionary, a cucaracha (usually translated cockroach) is defined as a centipede.

Some other interesting words in that Spanish-English dictionary relate to the insect called the louse: one in particular is pedículo, cognate with English peduncle. That ped- element is “foot” as is the -pede element of centipede. The Latin name for a body louse or head louse is pediculus. While they don’t burrow under the skin, they do feed on blood, which is getting us closer to… something. 

This was not the only time in my life I had to spend time looking into centipede words. When in my twenties, I wrote a screenplay (never produced and I haven’t the slightest delusion that it ever will be) set in 18th century England. It was one of my first efforts at writing something in historical English. The few people I ever got to take look at it were downright offended by it, because every producer who is willing to consider historical material wants Last of the Mohicans and instead I was giving them Blackadder. But, point is, one of the jokes in the script was reliant on a character mentioning a centipede. I had to verify that it was an 18th century word; I did determine that though it was used at the time, it appeared to be chiefly a scientific term. I think I came to the conclusion that “forty-legs” was the most likely common term, but it spoiled the joke. The other ye-olde-tyme names for these bugs that I found included “many-feet,” “palmer,” (this is usually applied to what we now call a caterpillar) as well as a variant word “centipee.” The centipedes were also conflated with earwigs (again, that implication of something parasitic) and also with what were termed “cheslips,” these being our rollie-pollies yet again.

Some of the conflation traces back very far indeed, all the way to the Roman author Pliny. His book of Natural History was pretty much required reading until the 18th century, when people began to learn that actual observable phenomena contradicted most of what he reported. Moreover, people from northern countries would read his books and have no idea what he was talking about (Snakes? We don’t have those in Iceland!) These folks would then attempt to fill in the blanks with their own ideas, such as the centipede pictured at the top of this column, which resembles a six-legged neon rat trying to gnaw his way out of the frame (taken from the Liber de Natura Rerum.)

“The Wool beads or Caterpillers, which some cal Millepedae, others, Multipedae or Centipedae,” one 17th century Pliny translation puts it, “which are a kind of earth-wormes keeping vpon the ground, all hairy, hauing many feet, & courbing arch wise as they creep.” Clearly meaning the caterpillars in this case; then later in the same translation: “The worms with many feet called sowes or cheselips [...] (there be Latine writers who call this worme Centipeda, as if it had an hundred feet).”

The Anglo-Saxons also had the smega-wyrm, believed by them to be a kind of parasitic worm; Bosworth identifies it as ringworm or shingles, neither of which are actually caused by worms. It’s tempting to credit the mythic New Mexico centipede to something like this, but, substitute teacher’s claim of having seen the bug indicates a legitimate parasite was present.

So, it seems extremely plausible that the parasitic “centipede” is the result of some kind of mix-up or misidentification. But with what? Old people talk about the phenomenon; younger people, even regional historians, have never heard of it – that suggests something no longer found commonly, and that probably hasn’t been for a while. 

One possibility is the screwworm, the larva of a type of blow fly. The flies lay eggs in wounds, resulting in the maggots growing inside the victim’s flesh, where they live and feed. They’ve been eradicated in the US since the 1960s, but their range used to include New Mexico. Screwworms don’t have legs, but they look about as much like a centipede as a caterpillar or cockroach or six legged rat does. They can get to be as big as 2/3rds of an inch, which is in line with the substitute teacher’s story of what was removed from her ankle.

In conclusion… don’t listen to your grandparents or teachers or local historians. I think that’s the lesson here, right?