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.