Insect, bug or worm?
What do we think of when we hear the word insect? Bees? Butterflies? Or maybe bedbugs? Fleas? Are any of these words out of place here? If so, why? In the specialized (biological) sense, insects are a class of animals from the phylum Arthropoda, and their body structure includes a head, a thorax and an abdomen, three pairs of jointed appendages and sometimes two pairs of wings. Therefore, both a firefly and a louse are insects. However, language users who are not specialists in entomology perceive the world much more instinctively; they do not look at small creatures to determine whether a tick, for example, is an insect based on the structure of its body (it is not!).
The word ‘insect’ comes from Latin and initially had the same meaning as today’s ‘bug’ (owad in Polish), so it was used to name a class of animals in general. Today, however, according to Polish language dictionaries, ‘insect’ means a ‘parasitic bug’ specifically, so, for example, a flea or a louse. We would not describe a butterfly in this way, for when we buy a chemical insecticide in a shop, we hope that we will get rid of pests with it. The semantics of the word ‘insect’ has therefore been narrowed.
So, is the meaning of the word ‘bug’ (owad) identical for biologists and non-specialists? Probably not entirely. Instinctively, we will use this name for flying insects, such as bees and flies, but not necessarily those that do not fly, such as silverfish or cockroaches. Some insects are also called ‘worms’ (robaki); these are often creatures inhabiting meadows and forests, whose species’ names we do not know. The word robak (‘worm’ in English), comes from the verb chrobotać, which means to make a scraping or grating sound, but it is not only insects that make this sound that are called this. This term also includes earthworms, leeches and other small animals that are not within the scope of entomological research.
Owad, insekt, robak (‘bug’, ‘insect’, ‘worm’) are words that are often considered synonymous but evoke different emotions in language users. Colloquial language is quite expressive in relation to insects. We will gladly give diminutive names to those animals that we like: motylek (little butterfly), biedroneczka (little ladybug). We may meet a robaczek (little worm), but a robal (big, ugly worm) is something else. At night, a nasty komarzysko (big, nasty mosquito) flies by our ear, and some insect names serve as fancy metaphors for people, such as a wasp (osa) or a drone (truteń). Let’s take a closer look at selected insects and see what language tells us through their names and what their place is in our Polish linguistic consciousness.
