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Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 82. The word origin today
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is scarecrow. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. A scarecrow is a figure or
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a model of a person, usually a man dressed in old clothes and often held up
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with wood or sticks to scare or frighten birds away from crops in the field. Okay.
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Let's continue the word itself is easy to understand how it was formed. You know,
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you have scare... scare means to frighten and crows were the most common birds
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that would eat crops in the field. So you could understand how they got the idea
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or how the word was formed to be Scarecrow. Okay. Let's continue. The origin
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goes back to ancient Greece. The first scarecrow was not actually meant to
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scare birds away. It was a wooden statue to represent the
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God Priapus. Priapus was a fertility God and son of Aphrodite the goddess of love.
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So it kind of makes sense. You might put a statue of a fertility God in the
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fields because you know, you want the land to be fertile. So I guess that was
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the idea of the connection. However let's continue here. He was put there because
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he was a symbol of fertility by today's standards, he would be considered to be
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obscene or maybe even a little dirty, because he was always represented with
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an erection. Which means his you know , his sexual part down there was always
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stimulated. So even the statue they had of it they added that feature to it. Okay.
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The Greeks soon discovered the model helped to keep away birds. So this is how
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they got the idea. Whoa ! This scarecrow thing is a good idea to keep away you know birds,
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so they don't eat a lot of our crops. Priapus was known to be ugly because he
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was cursed by Hera , the wife of Zeus. Remember now, Zeus was the god of the gods and
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Hera was his wife and she was also a goddess too.
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She was jealous because ... she was jealous that Paris declared Aphrodite to be to
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be more beautiful so she made him (Priapus) ugly. All right. So don't remember Paris this is
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a character from you know Helen of Troy you know, Achilles remember he's the guy
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that actually ends up killing Achilles and he kind of... he was the one that was
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at fault for starting the Trojan War because you know they kidnapped Helen
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and he was the one that was in fell in love with Helen. So that's the Paris
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we're talking about here. He's though ... so he's kind of a
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troublemaker. All right so made him ugly. But anyway, Hera made him (Priapus )ugly and she also
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made his sex organ so that it was stimulated. So I don't know if you wanted
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stimulated all the time. So she really tried to punish him. But if he had an
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opportunity for sex he would become impotent or something would stop himself
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he must have been forever frustrated ... poor guy. He was kicked out of Olympius
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you know. That was the you know, that was like the heaven or where the gods were.
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And he was thrown to Earth where the shepherds found him. So that's why the
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farmers ended up putting him supposedly in the field or that was the idea behind
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it. The Romans adopted this practice from the Greeks too. All right. Let's continue. Now
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we go sometime later you know during the Middle Ages small children were
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sometimes employed as real-life scarecrows and used to chase away birds
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by making noise and hitting pots or sometimes throwing rocks at them. Okay. Good.
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However many plagues lowered the population in the Middle Ages and there
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weren't quite as many children around. Remember back then you know. this was
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this was an agrarian society. So they had a lot of farms and stuff for you know,
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growing food for the people. And suddenly the children kind of ... a lot of children
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disappeared with when the plagues eliminated a lot of people. So basically
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the farmers you know started thinking of other ideas. Okay. So let's continue here.
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Yeah. Farmers started making scarecrows out of straw like the ones we see today
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and clothes and and old clothes. And sometimes a gourd or a turnip for the
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face or for the head. Okay, which used to be the head. So this kind of worked. So
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this is where the first scarecrows started to be made. And you know, more
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looking like what we see is our modern-day scarecrows. All right. And we just
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have one example sentence to show how we use it today. So nowadays scarecrows are
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used as a form of ... more of a form of a decoration around Halloween. You know,
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they have a lot of other ways to keep away birds and stuff. And they have
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pesticides today. So they don't use ... there's not as many real scarecrows out
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there anymore. But we still see scarecrows at least in
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the US. Always you know, as decorations around Halloween. Anyway I hope you got it.
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I hope you found it informative and interesting. Thank you for your time. Bye-
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bye.