After seeing Antonioni’s Blow-Up for, I think, the third time (his greatest hit, but not his best movie), I finally decided to read the Cortázar story, “Las babas del diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”), on which it was partially based; I confess that one reason was that I was curious about the title. Here’s the relevant passage from the story:
Y mientras se lo decía gozaba socarronamente de cómo el chico se replegaba, se iba quedando atrás-con sólo no moverse-y de golpe (parecía casi increíble) se volvía y echaba a correr, creyendo el pobre que caminaba y en realidad huyendo a la carrera, pasando al lado del auto, perdiéndose como un hilo de la Virgen en el aire de la mañana.
Pero los hilos de la Virgen se llaman también babas del diablo, y Michel tuvo que aguantar minuciosas imprecaciones, oírse llamar entrometido e imbécil, mientras se esmeraba deliberadamente en sonreír y declinar, con simples movimientos de cabeza, tanto envío barato.
Here’s Paul Blackburn’s translation:
And while that was getting said, I noticed on the sly how the boy was falling back, sort of actively backing up though without moving, and all at once (it seemed almost incredible) he turned and broke into a run, the poor kid, thinking that he was walking off and in fact in full flight, running past the side of the car, disappearing like a gossamer filament of angel-spit in the morning air.
But filaments of angel-spittle are also called devil-spit, and Michel had to endure rather particular curses, to hear himself called meddler and imbecile, taking great pains meanwhile to smile and to abate with simple movements of his head such a hard sell.
I don’t know why he chose to render “un hilo de la Virgen” (‘a thread of the Virgin’) with “a gossamer filament of angel-spit,” but in any case it’s not clear what the phrase means; fortunately, this site cleared it up:
“El hilo de la virgen” es una teleraña tan liviana y fina que flota por el aire. Según un documental (que vi hace mucho) la propietaria de la telaraña puede viajar muy lejos e incluso cruzar océanos.
“The virgin’s thread” is a spider web so light and fine that it floats through the air. According to a documentary (which I saw a long time ago) the owner of the spider web can travel very far and even cross oceans.
My question is: is there a name in English, or for that matter other languages, for such drifting spider webs?
Not in common-usage Russian. Cue Tyutchev’s fav verse
Где бодрый серп гулял и падал колос,
Теперь уж пусто все — простор везде, —
Лишь паутины тонкий волос
Блестит на праздной борозде …
There is a wikipedia entry in Polish though
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babie_lato_(biologia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider)
>
That’s gossamer, right?
I don’t know of a special English name for the threads other than “gossamer”, but the process of using them to fly is called “ballooning”. See, for example, a 2021 note from the Missouri Department of Conservation, as well as a 2022 article in Physics Magazine and its technical counterpart in Physical Review E. There is also a relevant Wikipedia entry.
Huh! I never heard of ballooning, but then the average Spanish-speaker has never heard of “los hilos de la Virgen” or “babas del diablo” (as I learned from my googling). It’s in the OED:
Thanks to all! (The phrase “to join the aerial plankton” sounds like a variant on “to shuffle off the mortal coil.”)
Interestingly, the Czech name for spider gossamer is babí léto (“old woman’s summer”), the same as the name for Indian summer (see Wiktionary). This 2024 “Czechology” note on Indian Summer claims that “the name derives from the name of the autumn goddess Baba who knits funeral robes for the summer gods and the white fibers we see fly in the air in the Indian summer are yarn from those robes. Another theory says that the names comes from the resemblance of the pieces of spiderwebs in the air to the silver hair of old women”.
“ But filaments of angel-spittle are also called devil-spit,…”
I would have rather translated “las babas del diablo” as “devil drool” instead. It also reminds me of how my mom calls dragonflies, “caballitos del diablo” , that is “the devil’s little horses” and the Milky Way is “el camino de señor Santiago” , that is “the road (or way) of Lord St. James.”
For gossamer, Japanese has 遊糸 (yūshi) for “floating thread” or “playing thread”. The Japanese Wikipedia page for “ballooning” notes that the phenomenon is also called 雪迎え (yukimukae) or “welcoming snow” in autumn (which is also used as a poetic seasonal word) and 雪送り (yukiokuri) or “farewell snow” in spring.
Also true in some other languages, e.g. Polish, German; see discussion at INDIAN SUMMER and GOSSAMER.
In Danish it is called “flyvende sommer”.
Den Danske Ordbog has an entry:
https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?mselect=59009685&query=%20flyvende%20sommer:
which Google translates as:
flying summer
ZOOLOGY long, thin cobweb threads that (young) spiders spin and are then transported through the air when the wind picks up the threads
The Danish Wikipedia has a similar, short entry (not picked up by other language wikipedias):
https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyvende_sommer
which says that the expression “is the poetic expression of the way certain arachnids travel” and claims that the corresponding german expression is “fliegender sommer” og the french is “été volant”
The older (and bigger) “Ordbog over det danske sprog” does not recognize the expression, but I believe it is both old and well-known in Danish. I’m about 80, and I have “always” known and used it.
(Sorry: I don’t know how to format the links).
No expression for it in Kusaal AFAIK, though it is notable the the Kusaal word for “cobweb”, paanlʋŋ, is completely unrelated to any word for “spider” (and seems to have no cognates outside Kusaal, come to that.*) It doesn’t have any other meaning but “cobweb”, so it’s not a more general word which happens also to be used for spiders’ webs. Very odd.
There’s a pan-Oti-Volta tendency for words (or stems) for “spider” to be used also for “ghost.” Maybe some ancient taboo has caused the loss of an older etymon. No idea … nobody seems to have any particular superstitious hangups about spiders nowadays, at any rate. And some other Oti-Volta languages do have related words for “spider” and “web”, e.g. Waama nakitabu “spider”, nakitama “spider’s web” (same stem, just a different noun class.)
* Come to think of it, Kusaal paanlʋŋ /pã:lʊŋ/ “cobweb” could be related to the Mooré verb pà̰nme “braid, plait.” (Mooré has a rule changing /l/ to /n/ after nasalised vowels.) If so, it’s odd that it should have ended up restricted to spiders’ weavings, though.
Makes you wonder about Anansi the trickster spider, but in fact he’s a trickster hare up in the savanna (it’s the same in Hausa.) He’s called Asumbul in Kusaal, a name which may or may not be a mangled form of Asu’ombil “Little Hare.” Br’er Rabbit.
I’d say “web” at least in American English has ended up mostly restricted to spiders’ weavings, and to a popular hypertext network that resembles them and may have been named for them. I admit we do still have web belts.
“As a result, the associative links, access paths, etc. between information and/or information sources more closely resemble a spider’s web rather than the conventional tree-like or directory-like structure. The topology of the Internet nodes within this information network can also be thought of as a similar web.”
White, B. (1993). WorldWideWeb (WWW). In: Heck, A., Murtagh, F. (eds) Intelligent Information Retrieval: The Case of Astronomy and Related Space Sciences. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 182. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-33110-2_10
See also WebCrawler and Lycos.
I’d say “web” at least in American English has ended up mostly restricted to spiders’ weavings, and to a popular hypertext network that resembles them and may have been named for them.
Among printers, the term web offset is common.
Example: https://blog.johnroberts.com/print-buyers-introduction-to-web-offset-printing
Beyond WebCrawler and Lycos, see also the earlyish WWW-software company Inktomi (1996-2003), whose “name, pronounced ‘INK-tuh-me’, was derived from a Lakota legend about the trickster spider Iktomi, known for his ability to outsmart larger adversaries.” Elsewhere on wikipedia it is stated that “Alternate names for Iktómi include Ikto, Ictinike, Inktomi, Unktome, and Unktomi,” reflecting some combination of variation among dialects and/or sister languages and variation among romanization approaches, but the business looks to have simply picked an extant spelling different from the one the wikipedia contibutors thought was the unmarked standard.
I was much too fast in brushing aside the old “Ordbog over det danske sprog”. Of course it has the expression.
Here it is under “sommer, 4”:
https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=sommer
The entry mentions several names for the phenomenon:
flyvende sommer, bortflyvende sommer, jomfruens spind, jomfruens traad, Jomfruspind, Luft-traad, Luft-væv, Soltraad, Sommer-flage, Sommer-spind, Sommer-traad, Sommer-væv, as well as the German “fliegender sommer” and Altweibersommer, and the French “été volant”, and the English “gossamer”.
Here is a raw Google translation of the entry:
4) flying summer (cf. ænyd. flying summer; after Ty. fliegender sommer, fr. été volant; the term probably refers to the occurrence of the phenomenon in early and (especially) late summer; other terms are virgin’s web or thread (see u. Jomfru 2.2), Virgin’s web, Air-thread (1), -weaving (1), Sol-thread, Summer-flake, -spind, -thread, -weaving, Ty. altweibersommer, Eng. gossamer; for an older explanation see UnivBl.I.46ff.) about the cobweb threads produced by certain spider genera, on which the spiders (in spring and (especially) in autumn) float through the air. Funke.(1801).I.22. Kaalund.58. Everywhere in the air flickered the rainbow-colored webs of the flying summer. Pont.LP.VIII.10. Knud Pouls.BD.77. (l. br.) with unspecified art.: She quickly brushed a “flying summer” from her face. ErlKrist.NS.172. pictorially or in comparisons (spec. about fleeting love) (sometimes with connection to bet. 3.2). it was one of those vague, pleasant relationships that can arise between men and women who are beyond their first youth. . It is a kind of flying summer. JPJac.II.239. What was she to you then? … A sweet mistress… But still a joke only, a momentary desire, a flying summer. Nans.M.136. The heat plays like flying summer over her naked shoulders. AndNx.PE.III.247.
I keep wondering how you felt upon discovering that, apart from a very general theme, the film has nothing to do with the short story.
@cuchuflete: Thanks. Apparently the “web” is the roll of paper fed in, I guess from its resemblance to a roll of cloth. There are other webs around, such as the ones on a duck’s feet. As far as frequency goes, the first hundred hits at COCA were all about the World-Wide one.
I’m impressed by Blackburn’s translation, with some exceptions, such as switching from “angel-spit” to “angel-spittle”. What’s the point of that?
Un hilo = spit, los hilos = spittle? I was more struck by his using spit to translate both babas and hilo(s).
I keep wondering how you felt upon discovering that, apart from a very general theme, the film has nothing to do with the short story.
Well, I pretty much knew that going in, but it was a good read. This is the little square at the west end of the Ile St. Louis where the crucial scene takes place, for those who (like me) like to visualize such things.
That OED entry really should have a quote from Charlotte’s Web, from which generations of American children learned about spiders ballooning.
a trickster hare
Apparently the Sahara is the dividing line between two very broad folktale areas: north of it, the trickster is almost always a canid (fox/jackal/etc), while south of it it’s usually a hare. Appropriately given their location, I recently got forwarded a Tuareg trickster tale with both: the jackal tries to trick the rabbit, but gets out-tricked and killed.
I didn’t know a word for those flying spider threads in any language except, oddly, the Danish expression flyvende sommer that John Munkholm referred to above. This is because it gave the title to a string orchestra piece by Per Nørgård (in somewhat unidiomatic English translation as Fugitive Summer, but the Danish word is mentioned in the programme notes). My active Danish skills are no more than B1 level, and this seems like a word only C2 speakers would be likely to know otherwise.
You more or less have to have had your childhood in Denmark to encounter the word in real life. This of course correlates strongly with native proficiency. It’s actually been a fair few years since I’ve had a ballooning spider hit me, or rather its thread, and I never experienced seeing them in such masses that they made a rainbow, but I remember being taught the word(s) the first time I was hit by one, and it is indeed part of my active vocabulary.
(I was told that it’s mainly hatchlings that do it on a chance to get to a livable bush or something away from their siblings, and of course a lot of them will end up on a house wall or something—or in a child’s hair—and perish. Most adult spiders are too heavy to fly like that).
I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered ballooning spiders, though Europeans seem to speak of it as an ordinary occurrence, at least in season. Is it a lot more common in Europe than North America, or have I just been unlucky or unobservant?
I also can’t remember ever being hit by floating spiderwebs, but in the German countryside, you see these fine spiderwebs everywhere during their season.
Is it a lot more common in Europe than North America
I’ve never seen it myself, but Jonathan Edwards saw ballooning spiders going out to sea in Massachusetts and proclaimed it God’s providence for the fish.
I’ve only seen one at a time, I think.
I think each balloonist has a single floating filament, not a whole web? In Ireland I’ve seen and been crashed into by individual filaments often enough, but never seen swarms of them. I’ve seen carpets of dewy filaments on swards and hedges of a spring morning, but ignorantly assumed those derived from webs woven in situ by dozens of spiders per square metre, rather than filaments discarded by squadrons of thousands of ballooning spiderlings. Maybe there is an annual ballooning day similar to the annual nuptial flight of ants, but I have never seen such.
Buffalo ballooning. (Larson actually first drew a version of this joke with spiders, but he then realized that it would be funnier with both the balloon apparatus and the animal type changed.)