The serenity of springtime walks in the woods came to an end last week with my first black fly bites of the season. Heaving a sigh of defeat, I gazed into the future, past the black flies, into the mosquito months, and then, perhaps the worst of all, the no-see-ums. With or without its hyphens, this fly is a pain in the neck. It’s so small it can come through our window screens, with its lusty females desiring nothing more than to gorge themselves upon our blood, leaving us itchy and cranky. There are over 5,000 species in this family of bloodsuckers! Compare that to our poor family, the hominids, with just the chimps, gorillas and orangutans. We’re outnumbered.
I tried to tell the offspring recently that “no-see-um” is a politically incorrect term and perhaps should be avoided, but they refused to take me seriously, prompting me to go to the attic, dust off my Ph.D. diploma in linguistics from Princeton and hang it in a prominent place in the house. As I had attempted to explain to them, this is a name that goes back at least to the early 19th century, deriving from an imitation of the broken English that Native Americans may have used. You would hear this on TV westerns all the time: “Him leave-um town. Not here now. No see-um.” There were lots of jokey words and phrases having to do with Native Americans. My mother called the belly button “the place where the Indian shot you.” To arrive in “Indian time” meant whenever you felt like it. And of course there was the “Indian giver.” If we renamed the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, perhaps we should consider sending “no-see-um” to the showers as well.
There are a lot of replacements to choose from. In Europe they are called “sand flies,” which is also found here, especially in the South and Upper Mississippi Valley. If that seems too prosaic, there are other choices. Upstate New York calls them “punkies,” which came from the Dutch “punkje,” who took it from the Lenni Lenape word meaning “dust” or “ashes.” A Lenape legend tells of an evil witch doctor who was hunted down, killed and burned. The ashes (“punkwes”) from his charred body turned into little biting bugs that plague us to this day. It’s a word that also gave us the town in Pennsylvania where Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, comes out on Feb. 2 to tell us about the arrival of spring. When Moravian Christians first tried to settle there in 1772, the punkies were so thick they gave up and moved out.
If you don’t like either of those names, some in New England call them “midges,” “midgies” or “midgets.” Here we get into the usual confusion of names for species, with some people claiming all midges are biting flies, while others would say no, some bite and some don’t. There are also those who use “midges” to refer to those larger bloodsuckers, the notorious “black flies,” which in the South are also called “turkey gnats” and on the Plains “buffalo gnats” because of their attraction to those creatures. Other New England names for no-see-ums are the “nits” and the “gnats,” although the latter usually is reserved for non-biting flies that swarm.
As if all that weren’t enough to crowd into a discussion of no-see-ums, there’s something called “no-see-um theology” that weighs in on one of the big questions of human existence: If the Creator is all-powerful, all-good and all-merciful, why is there evil and suffering in the world? The answer is that just because we can’t see the Creator’s plan, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one, so quit worrying about it. That actually can come in handy when you’re outdoors in the summer, covered with itchy welts, asking yourself why in the name of all that’s sane did God create biting insects.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
