Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 82. The word origin today is scarecrow. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. A scarecrow is a figure or a model of a person, usually a man dressed in old clothes and often held up with wood or sticks to scare or frighten birds away from crops in the field. Okay. Let's continue the word itself is easy to understand how it was formed. You know, you have scare... scare means to frighten and crows were the most common birds that would eat crops in the field. So you could understand how they got the idea or how the word was formed to be Scarecrow. Okay. Let's continue. The origin goes back to ancient Greece. The first scarecrow was not actually meant to scare birds away. It was a wooden statue to represent the God Priapus. Priapus was a fertility God and son of Aphrodite the goddess of love. So it kind of makes sense. You might put a statue of a fertility God in the fields because you know, you want the land to be fertile. So I guess that was the idea of the connection. However let's continue here. He was put there because he was a symbol of fertility by today's standards, he would be considered to be obscene or maybe even a little dirty, because he was always represented with an erection. Which means his you know , his sexual part down there was always stimulated. So even the statue they had of it they added that feature to it. Okay. The Greeks soon discovered the model helped to keep away birds. So this is how they got the idea. Whoa ! This scarecrow thing is a good idea to keep away you know birds, so they don't eat a lot of our crops. Priapus was known to be ugly because he was cursed by Hera , the wife of Zeus. Remember now, Zeus was the god of the gods and Hera was his wife and she was also a goddess too. She was jealous because ... she was jealous that Paris declared Aphrodite to be to be more beautiful so she made him (Priapus) ugly. All right. So don't remember Paris this is a character from you know Helen of Troy you know, Achilles remember he's the guy that actually ends up killing Achilles and he kind of... he was the one that was at fault for starting the Trojan War because you know they kidnapped Helen and he was the one that was in fell in love with Helen. So that's the Paris we're talking about here. He's though ... so he's kind of a troublemaker. All right so made him ugly. But anyway, Hera made him (Priapus )ugly and she also made his sex organ so that it was stimulated. So I don't know if you wanted stimulated all the time. So she really tried to punish him. But if he had an opportunity for sex he would become impotent or something would stop himself he must have been forever frustrated ... poor guy. He was kicked out of Olympius you know. That was the you know, that was like the heaven or where the gods were. And he was thrown to Earth where the shepherds found him. So that's why the farmers ended up putting him supposedly in the field or that was the idea behind it. The Romans adopted this practice from the Greeks too. All right. Let's continue. Now we go sometime later you know during the Middle Ages small children were sometimes employed as real-life scarecrows and used to chase away birds by making noise and hitting pots or sometimes throwing rocks at them. Okay. Good. However many plagues lowered the population in the Middle Ages and there weren't quite as many children around. Remember back then you know. this was this was an agrarian society. So they had a lot of farms and stuff for you know, growing food for the people. And suddenly the children kind of ... a lot of children disappeared with when the plagues eliminated a lot of people. So basically the farmers you know started thinking of other ideas. Okay. So let's continue here. Yeah. Farmers started making scarecrows out of straw like the ones we see today and clothes and and old clothes. And sometimes a gourd or a turnip for the face or for the head. Okay, which used to be the head. So this kind of worked. So this is where the first scarecrows started to be made. And you know, more looking like what we see is our modern-day scarecrows. All right. And we just have one example sentence to show how we use it today. So nowadays scarecrows are used as a form of ... more of a form of a decoration around Halloween. You know, they have a lot of other ways to keep away birds and stuff. And they have pesticides today. So they don't use ... there's not as many real scarecrows out there anymore. But we still see scarecrows at least in the US. Always you know, as decorations around Halloween. Anyway I hope you got it. I hope you found it informative and interesting. Thank you for your time. Bye- bye.
B1 US scarecrow hera scare stimulated fertility ugly English Tutor Nick P Word Origins (82) Scarecrow 18 0 anitawu12 posted on 2019/10/24 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary