Even writing the word spider on a page can be enough to make a person who suffers arachnophobia shift with unease. What is it about these creatures, which live under the floorboards and scuttle across walls, that make many of us cringe with fear?
The word spider derives from the Old English word spinnan, which was the verb to spin. A spider, then, started out as a spiþra and it wasn’t until 1592, in The Repentance of Robert Greene, that the modern spelling appeared: “They with the spider sucke poison out of the most pretious flowers”.
“To spin” means “to draw out and twist the fibers of a material into a thread or yarn”, so the verb transferred from its use for the human activity of weaving to the arachnid’s activity of creating or ‘spinning’ a web in which to catch its prey.
Perhaps it is, in part, because of the spider’s method of hunting down this prey that the spider suffers a bad reputation. They carefully and artfully construct their sticky trap, ensnare a fly and move towards the helpless beast, ready to devour it. Its elaborate trap with its victim left writhing in despair suggests a cunning mind. However, this is, most likely, an over-emotional or irrational response to the life of the spider. In the famous science fiction novel Do androids dream of electric sheep? (1968), Philip K. Dick writes about empathy, intelligence and the spider explaining, “A solitary organism, such as the spider, would have no use for [empathy]; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey…the emphatic gift [blurs] the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated”. After all, it is the poor spider, towards the end of this novel, which has its legs picked off by the female character Pris, simply for fun.
But for those of us with arachnophobia, of course, there is more to our fear than the spider’s devious hunting tactics. There is something inexplicably ghastly about its form. How can a shape be so repulsive? Why is its hurried movement so vile? There may be no logical answer, and so, with that, it’s time to look away from today’s Word-of-the-day entry and regain some composure.
