"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/11/17 (attercop, haggersnash, cobweb, spinster)

This one is for Alison, who's written a book about spiders for children and how we should all embrace the spider, quite literally. And I wa salso talking quite recently about all the words in the dictionary for a curmudgeon, or somebody who's just quite sulky. And in there, you might also put attercop, and that was an old nickname for somebody who wasn't just sulky but was also quite spiteful with it - haggersnash was another word for them, so just slightly mean-spirited - was an attercop, which is ufair on the spider, because attercop actually was the word for spider before spider came along. And it's made up of atter, meaning poison, and coppe, which was the name for a head, so literally it was a poison head, because all spiders at that time were thought to be highly venomous, which is a little bit mean. But that attercop, the atter somehow, the poison bit, fell off and cop, the head bit, became the word for a spider for some time. And that how we came came to have our cobweb. I'm often asked about those because they were the webs of a cop, that word for a spider, and eventually the P became a B and we are stuck with cobwebs today. But wventually, the attercop became a spider. That comes from the old English word for spin, a much more neutral term, which means that the spinster and a spider intimately linked. Spinster actually, of course, to do with the fact that women used to spin for a living. Often if they didn't have a husband to rely on, they would just have to rely on the income from spinning and so it came to mean a slightly derogatoey term for a prim, unmarried woman, that was a spinster. Unlike the bachelor, who was a young knight, he had a far better deal. But, yes, spiders, we had some very strange beliefs, but I think, you know, we are much more neutral about them today, hopefully, certanly linguistically speaking and we should definitely embrace them.