Weird Words: Attercop

Weird Words: Attercop

1) A spider.
Many of us came across this word for the first and only time in the works of
J R R Tolkien, and even perhaps suspected he had invented it. But his
unfamiliar words were usually from ancient sources and "attercop" is a good
example. Bilbo sang this in an episode in The Hobbit when he was distracting
the spiders:

> Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
> Old fat spider can't see me!
> Attercop! Attercop!
> Won't you stop,
> Stop your spinning and look for me!
>
It's still known - it appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 24 May in an article
about Ian McMillan's work to create a modern dictionary of Yorkshire
dialect. He described it as an old-fashioned word that was still spoken in
North Yorkshire that could also mean a peevish person or a moaner. Mr
McMillan provided an illustrative sentence: "Tha' won't go in cos' of an
attercop? Tha's an attercop thissen!". ["tha": you; "thissen": yourself.]The
word is Old English, from "attor", poison + "cop", the head. ("Cop", or
"coppa", was also used by itself to mean a spider, so "cobweb" ought really
to be spelled "copweb".) The name was given to spiders in the mistaken
belief that they were all venomous. It was applied to a cross-grained,
ill-natured, figuratively venomous person no later than the sixteenth
century.