Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth on why locust may sometimes not mean 'locust'.
To me, a new controversialist on the subject is Alexander Ross. His rejoinder to Thomas Browne, Arcana Microcosmi, has kindly been typed on to a website (penelope.uchicago.edu/ross) by James Eason, since the book, published in 1652, is not easy to come by.
Ross gleans from Diodorus and Strabo the existence of a people in Ethiopia called Acridophagi (‘locust-eaters — like Othello’s Anthropophagi, ‘man-eaters’), who do not live beyond 40. ‘Their countrey affordeth neither fish nor flesh, but God provides them locusts every Spring.’ Ross describes their end: ‘A little before their death, their bodies grow scabby and itchy, so that with scratching, bloody matter and ugly lice of divers shapes, with wings, swarm out of their belly first, then from other parts, so that they pine away and die.’ This he blames on ‘their diet, which turns to putrid humours in their bodies’.
But then he undermines his argument by suggesting that the deadly lice come not from diet but from ‘nastinesse, and sweat, and unwholesom waters’. The word nastiness deserves further attention but, whatever Ross argued, John the Baptist did not meet his end through eating locusts.
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Peter.
March 29th, 2008 5:12pmWhen I was a child in the North of England,long ago, we used to buy a sort of sweet, sticky nut callad a 'locust bean'.I haven't seen any for a long time.Can they still be bought?