Piquer or mordre?

This isn’t quite a TKT (It being Wednesday), but it’s rather like that–being a musing on a linguistic occurence and etc.–so I toss it under the Linguistics category anyway and label it TKT. At any rate, here’s the deal: I got bit by a spider sometime last night in my sleep. It’s on the back of my right hand near where my index finger and thumb come together (Hmm, I wonder if there’s a medical term for that webbing place there…But I digress!) and it’s just these two tiny little red dots. It’s not red around them and it doesn’t really hurt unless I hit right on it, so I’m guessing it’s not poisonous. Years ago, it would have swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, poisonous or not, because insect/spider bites just caused a massive reaction regardless, but my body’s chemistry has since changed a lot, so now it’s just two dots.

So here’s the thing: is it a sting or a bite? The question started earlier this morning when I was telling a student about it before class, and I started wondering whether the French would say piquer “to sting” (From which comes the term piquant for the way it stings your mouth.) or mordre “to bite.” In English, I always say “bite” but that didn’t sound right to me in French, which is odd because I’m not French and have no right saying what sounds “right” or not. At any rate, my gut was telling me that it was piquer but my brain was telling me, “No, you idiot; spiders don’t sting–they bite!”

After mulling it over through my first two classes, I came back to my office and flipped through my French-English dictionary to see what it had to say on the subject. It listed snakes, animals, and humans under mordre and insects under piquer, but didn’t say anything about spiders. Spiders aren’t insects, but maybe the dictionary was just lumping them in with them anyway. I wandered down to Keri’s office and asked her, and she said that she thinks mordre sounds totally wrong too, so it must be piquer. She doesn’t know that she’s heard it before or not, but the French don’t say mosquito bite, they say piquer par un moustique so maybe it’s like that. She figures it has to do with the size of the critter doing the biting, and the more I thought about it, I decided it probably has more to do with the size of the bite itself.

Later, I was chit-chatting with Dr. Nelson and he said that he’s heard people refer to a spider bite as a spider sting. Crap! He even brought up that Bilbo (who I often get confused with Fredo) named his dagger/sword/thingie “Sting” after having killed a spider with it. (Of course, then I admited that I haven’t read the books and he was all like, “Oh! Then I leave you to your crochet.” Hehe.) This messed with my head even more because now I was wondering if calling a spider bite a bite or a sting was a regional thing that I was missing or if it was related to the French notion of the size of the bite (as I had fixed it in my brain). Then it occured to me to check my English dictionary to see what they had to say on the subject of bites and stings, and while sting was specific to a sort of piercing jab, bite included sting as a method of biting. < Pulls hair out >

OK, so I can deal with this. I decided that biting can be done in several different ways, but that if it’s very tiny biting, it can be called a sting because of the particular pain it causes or because of its needle-like methods. The French say piquer for spiders and mosquitos while in English we can say bite or sting for either. After having calmed my brain down a bit, I had the revelation that I should just look it up in the French dictionary. Duh! Why didn’t I think of that first?!

piquer v. – Percer en enfonçant un dard, un stylet, un crochet à venin. Être piqué par un moustique. Translated (roughly): to sting v. – to pierce by driving in a stinger, a proboscis, a venomous fang. To be stung by a mosquito. Well, there it is. Now I can stop wondering about it.