Transcript of “Crazy as a Betsy Bug or Bedbug”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Jane Kenyon in Tippecanoe County, Indiana.
Hi, Jane in Tippecanoe County.
Yes, hi. I have a question that came to my mind when I was reading a book by Kinky Friedman.
The book is Armadillos and Old Lace, and he used a phrase, crazy as a Betsy bug, the name Betsy, several times in the book, and then it made me remember that as a child, I remember saying crazy as a bed bug. So my questions are, who is this poor Betsy, and how did she come to be associated with craziness and bugs, and how do we know that bed bugs are crazy?
Wow, that’s quite a list, Jane. Well, I’m sure you can answer them. Have you ever had an experience with bed bugs?
No, I just remember, don’t let the bed bugs bite when we went to bed.
Right. Well, I haven’t either, but if you see video of them, they move around in a kind of erratic way. And I guess they also have an effect on the bed owner, too, right?
Oh, I bet. Sounds like lots of itching.
Yes. I would say that the far more interesting insect here, though, is the Betsy bug that you mentioned. It goes by lots and lots of different names, particularly in the South, like Best Bug or Bessy Bug or Best Betty or Betsy Beetle. They’re sometimes called patent leather beetles.
They’ve got this glossy back that does make them look like patent leather, and they’re an inch or two long. And they usually live in decaying logs and they’re super interesting in terms of the insect world because they’re a kind of rarity in that they live as families. The parents look after the eggs until they hatch and then they feed the little ones and it’s really unusual in the insect world.
But they also make 14 different kinds of sounds that are usually a kind of hissing or wheezing or some people think it actually sounds like the word Bessie if you disturb them. The technical term for that is stridulation, which comes from a Latin word that means to make a harsh noise. It’s like our word strident.
So it’s really the sound that makes us or the bugs seem crazy. In the case of the Betsy bugs, for sure.
Well, thank you. That’s very interesting. And I learned something from you as well as from Kinky Friedman. We’re in good company.
You can always learn from Kinky. So thank you for the enlightenment and the fun.
Take care, Jane.
All righty.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, you know when you’re reading and you highlight that passage or you write it down on a note and you say, I’m going to look that up later and find out what that means.
Well, sometimes you don’t and sometimes you do. And sometimes you call Away With Words to find out.
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