Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 82. The word origin today
is scarecrow. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. A scarecrow is a figure or
a model of a person, usually a man dressed in old clothes and often held up
with wood or sticks to scare or frighten birds away from crops in the field. Okay.
Let's continue the word itself is easy to understand how it was formed. You know,
you have scare... scare means to frighten and crows were the most common birds
that would eat crops in the field. So you could understand how they got the idea
or how the word was formed to be Scarecrow. Okay. Let's continue. The origin
goes back to ancient Greece. The first scarecrow was not actually meant to
scare birds away. It was a wooden statue to represent the
God Priapus. Priapus was a fertility God and son of Aphrodite the goddess of love.
So it kind of makes sense. You might put a statue of a fertility God in the
fields because you know, you want the land to be fertile. So I guess that was
the idea of the connection. However let's continue here. He was put there because
he was a symbol of fertility by today's standards, he would be considered to be
obscene or maybe even a little dirty, because he was always represented with
an erection. Which means his you know , his sexual part down there was always
stimulated. So even the statue they had of it they added that feature to it. Okay.
The Greeks soon discovered the model helped to keep away birds. So this is how
they got the idea. Whoa ! This scarecrow thing is a good idea to keep away you know birds,
so they don't eat a lot of our crops. Priapus was known to be ugly because he
was cursed by Hera , the wife of Zeus. Remember now, Zeus was the god of the gods and
Hera was his wife and she was also a goddess too.
She was jealous because ... she was jealous that Paris declared Aphrodite to be to
be more beautiful so she made him (Priapus) ugly. All right. So don't remember Paris this is
a character from you know Helen of Troy you know, Achilles remember he's the guy
that actually ends up killing Achilles and he kind of... he was the one that was
at fault for starting the Trojan War because you know they kidnapped Helen
and he was the one that was in fell in love with Helen. So that's the Paris
we're talking about here. He's though ... so he's kind of a
troublemaker. All right so made him ugly. But anyway, Hera made him (Priapus )ugly and she also
made his sex organ so that it was stimulated. So I don't know if you wanted
stimulated all the time. So she really tried to punish him. But if he had an
opportunity for sex he would become impotent or something would stop himself
he must have been forever frustrated ... poor guy. He was kicked out of Olympius
you know. That was the you know, that was like the heaven or where the gods were.
And he was thrown to Earth where the shepherds found him. So that's why the
farmers ended up putting him supposedly in the field or that was the idea behind
it. The Romans adopted this practice from the Greeks too. All right. Let's continue. Now
we go sometime later you know during the Middle Ages small children were
sometimes employed as real-life scarecrows and used to chase away birds
by making noise and hitting pots or sometimes throwing rocks at them. Okay. Good.
However many plagues lowered the population in the Middle Ages and there
weren't quite as many children around. Remember back then you know. this was
this was an agrarian society. So they had a lot of farms and stuff for you know,
growing food for the people. And suddenly the children kind of ... a lot of children
disappeared with when the plagues eliminated a lot of people. So basically
the farmers you know started thinking of other ideas. Okay. So let's continue here.
Yeah. Farmers started making scarecrows out of straw like the ones we see today
and clothes and and old clothes. And sometimes a gourd or a turnip for the
face or for the head. Okay, which used to be the head. So this kind of worked. So
this is where the first scarecrows started to be made. And you know, more
looking like what we see is our modern-day scarecrows. All right. And we just
have one example sentence to show how we use it today. So nowadays scarecrows are
used as a form of ... more of a form of a decoration around Halloween. You know,
they have a lot of other ways to keep away birds and stuff. And they have
pesticides today. So they don't use ... there's not as many real scarecrows out
there anymore. But we still see scarecrows at least in
the US. Always you know, as decorations around Halloween. Anyway I hope you got it.
I hope you found it informative and interesting. Thank you for your time. Bye-
bye.