Ermintruder
The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all...
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2013
- Messages
- 6,209
Really? How has that only come to light now? The comedic potential is endless...I have just discovered they are really called Armadillidildo!
Interesting that the stated photolabels you show for them is 'slaters' (this being their common name in Scotland and Ireland)
http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/09/many-names-brits-woodlice
How Many Names do Brits Have for Woodlice?
ANGLOPHENIA
BY FRASER MCALPINE | 3 YEARS AGO
There’s not a lot to do in the British countryside, especially if you’re whiling the decades away waiting for someone to invent the internet. So you can’t blame the residents of a tiny island nation for choosing to pass the time creating quite so many cute little names for the common woodlouse. For entertainment value, it will have very much been the Facebook of its day.
And they’ve really made a go of it too. There are over 40 different varieties of woodlouse common to the British Isles, but there are a far greater variety of different names and spellings for the species as a whole, depending on location, imagination and the ability to think laterally. Too many to count, in fact.
Towards the west of England—Devon, to be precise—woodlice are also known as chiggypigs, or chickypigs or choogeypigs. A little farther north and east in Dorset, they’re chiggywigs, and up past Bristol in Gloucestershire they’re chuckypigs or charliepigs. You get the gist. Just think of a rotund landlady in a Dickens novel—or a similarly matronly hedgehog in a Beatrix Potter story—imagine what her surname might be, and you’re basically there.
You’ll notice a definite porcine theme developing there too, and this continues across a great deal of the woodlouse nicknames that have stuck over the years. The people of Bristol have been known to call them slunkerpigs, or there’s woodpigs, timperpigs and penny sows. In fact, some people from Cornwall and Devon managed to achieve double bacon by calling them sowpigs (or, as it came out in the local accent; zowpigs).
In Cornwall, they are also known as grammasows. And this is a crossover point between two naming traditions. It’s half pig and half grandparent, and some of the other names—granddad gravys, granddads, granny greys, granny granshers, do seem to infer a certain age and respectability to these tiny critters. In fact, in some parts of the country they have been called croogers if small, and granfy croogers if larger.