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  • 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.

Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 82. The word origin today

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