There was a good-sized river outside my grandfather’s boyhood home, and when he would go to there to swim in the summer, he knew that he didn’t dare take a nap. Dangerous flying insects lived there, hovering about the riverbank, waiting to get him. Not the mosquito, if that’s what you’re thinking; no, it was nothing less than the “devil’s darning needle,” an insect so evil that it had been enlisted by Satan himself to prey on children. As everyone knew, if a boy or girl fell asleep, and if they had recently told a lie (and as Grandpa said, who hadn’t?), the darning needle would seek you out and sew your mouth up! Grandpa believed this completely, doubting it no more than he would doubt the existence of the river itself.
There are variations on what the darning needle would do: some said it would stitch up your fingers and toes while you were asleep, or the ears of boys playing hooky. Others claimed that the mouths of scolding women or swearing men would be sewn up tight, or that it would sting you to death, or even go into your ear and attack your brain! Surely enough danger to keep most children on the straight and narrow.
This was, of course, what most of us call the “dragonfly,” but until fairly recently it was the “darning needle,” with or without the “devil,” all through the northern and western U.S. That name could change depending on which part of the body was targeted: sometimes it was the “ear cutter” or, in Wisconsin, the “eye stinger.”
Outside of the northern states, the name and the folklore shifted. In the southern coastal states, it was the “mosquito hawk,” because it darts in like a bird of prey to pluck bugs out of the air. Moving in from the coast, it was the “snake doctor” in most of the old South. The two bumps on its back were supposedly its saddlebags, and when it found a wounded snake, perhaps one that you thought you had killed with a blow or two, it would heal it, good as new. The same idea of taking care of snakes was picked up in Pennsylvania-German as “Schlangenhieter.” This is a particularly interesting example of how words are re-interpreted. German “Schlangen” is “snakes,” and “Hieter” (pronounced as in English “heater,” standard German Hüter = guardian), was misheard as “snake heeder” as it moved into the north midlands region of the U.S. Some folks lost the H, hearing it as “snake eater,” not in the sense that they eat snakes, but that they eat the bugs that pester them. But in most of that region from Pennsylvania to Colorado, it acquired an F as the “snake feeder,” again thinking of it as the snake’s assistant, bringing it its dinner. It’s probably no accident that this bizarre-looking, scary bug with the long, needle-like abdomen is associated with the dark forces: the devil, snakes, or even sorcery in Kentucky and Missouri where it was the “witch doctor.”
There are dozens of other words for this creature, among them “helicopter” in the Midwest, “sewing bug” in the upper Midwest, “spindle” in N.J., or some associate it with horses: the “horse doctor,” if friendly, the “horse stinger” if not. If you fish, you may have used the larvae or nymphs of this insect for bait under the name of “perch bugs.”
I’m using the past tense to describe these names, because I’m not sure to what degree any of them have continued into the present, and that’s a shame. Grandpa never heard of a dragonfly growing up, while I never heard of the darning needle. Somewhere in there, some adult decided that they shouldn’t be scaring kids with stories like this, getting them all worked up about an innocent insect just going about its business, and no doubt there is something to that. But then again, what a bland, homogenized, sanitized existence we end up with, without the folklore, without the scare, without the devil himself! (or is it “themself” these days?)
I encourage you all to revive the devil’s darning needle, or at least the “darning needle” part, to invigorate the culture, give it some meat, and as a byproduct, cultivate a moral society where children are given an incentive early on not to lie. So go find a kid and scare the daylights out of them. The happy results – honest children growing into honest adults – will be felt in the family home, the schools, and even all the way to the corridors of power in state capitals and Washington, D.C. Especially there.
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.