Any Housing Schemes For Non First Time...
Home & Garden0 min ago
Gentle
4 Answers
How did the name gentle originate with respect to maggotts for fishing.
Answers
1 to 4 of 4
Best Answer
No best answer has yet been selected by OmanYorkie. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
The name gentle for a bluebottle larva has been in use since the 1500s. The word itself comes from the Latin gentilis, meaning of the same family or clan. This later took on the meaning of well-born, as in gentlefolk, gentleman etc.
Why it attached itself to a maggot is anybody's guess. I wondered whether there might have been a - rather unlikely - connection in the originators' minds between blue blood and bluebottle!
Why it attached itself to a maggot is anybody's guess. I wondered whether there might have been a - rather unlikely - connection in the originators' minds between blue blood and bluebottle!
I vaguely remember reading that it became established somewhere in Shakespeare's works, Gentle was the name of one of the characters????????? Not sure about this though.
Maggot is the nomenclature for most fly species' larvae, not just the blue bottle. At a guess I would think that it may have been an attempt at disguising the awful connotations associated with maggot and rotten meat and thus became a 'gentler' name when these became an important medical instrument.
Maggots are also known as 'pinkies'.
Maggot is the nomenclature for most fly species' larvae, not just the blue bottle. At a guess I would think that it may have been an attempt at disguising the awful connotations associated with maggot and rotten meat and thus became a 'gentler' name when these became an important medical instrument.
Maggots are also known as 'pinkies'.
As I said earlier, The Oxford English Dictionary defines gentle - not maggot - in this sense as (quote) "the larva of the flesh-fly or bluebottle".
The word may have been around in speech for some time before then, but It is first recorded thus in print in 1578. At that point, Shakespeare was 14!
(I don't recall a character with the name Gentle in any of his plays, but - as I have not read them all - there may well have been. If I get the time later, I may skim through all his dramatis personae to check. Presumably, if he existed, he will have been a wriggly, rather unpleasant character.)
The word may have been around in speech for some time before then, but It is first recorded thus in print in 1578. At that point, Shakespeare was 14!
(I don't recall a character with the name Gentle in any of his plays, but - as I have not read them all - there may well have been. If I get the time later, I may skim through all his dramatis personae to check. Presumably, if he existed, he will have been a wriggly, rather unpleasant character.)
1 to 4 of 4
