Name: 英語の家庭教師ニックPの単語の起源 (82) かかし (English Tutor Nick P Word Origins (82) Scarecrow)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:28:27.000Z
Duration: 5 min 47 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi this is Tutor Nick P  and this is Word Origins 82. The word origin today

is scarecrow. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. A scarecrow is a figure or

a model of a person, usually a man dressed in old clothes and often held up

with wood or sticks to scare or frighten birds away from crops in the field. Okay.

Let's continue the word itself is easy to understand how it was formed. You know,

you have scare...  scare means to frighten and crows were the most common birds

that would eat crops in the field. So you could understand how they got the idea

or how the word was formed to be Scarecrow. Okay. Let's continue. The origin

goes back to ancient Greece. The first scarecrow was not actually meant to

scare birds away.  It was a wooden statue to represent the

God Priapus.  Priapus was a fertility God and son of Aphrodite the goddess of love.

So it kind of makes sense. You might put a statue of a fertility God in the

fields because you know,  you want the land to be fertile. So I guess that was

the idea of the connection. However let's continue here. He was put there because

he was a symbol of fertility by today's standards,  he would be considered to be

obscene or maybe even a little dirty,  because he was always represented with

an erection. Which means his you know , his sexual part down there was always

stimulated. So even the statue they had of it they added that feature to it. Okay.

The Greeks soon discovered the model helped to keep away birds. So this is how

they got the idea. Whoa ! This scarecrow thing is a good idea to keep away you know birds,

so they don't eat a lot of our crops.  Priapus was known to be ugly because he

was cursed by Hera , the wife of Zeus.  Remember now, Zeus was the god of the gods and

Hera was his wife and she was also a goddess too.

She was jealous because ... she was jealous that Paris declared Aphrodite to be to

be more beautiful so she made him (Priapus) ugly.  All right. So don't remember Paris this is

a character from you know Helen of Troy you know,  Achilles remember he's the guy

that actually ends up killing Achilles and he kind of...  he was the one that was

at fault for starting the Trojan War because you know they kidnapped Helen

and he was the one that was in fell in love with Helen. So that's the Paris

we're talking about here.  He's though ... so he's kind of a

troublemaker. All right so made him ugly.  But anyway,  Hera made him (Priapus )ugly and she also

made his sex organ so that it was stimulated. So I don't know if you wanted

stimulated all the time. So she really tried to punish him. But if he had an

opportunity for sex he would become impotent or something would stop himself

he must have been forever frustrated ... poor guy. He was kicked out of Olympius

you know. That was the you know,  that was like the heaven or where the gods were.

And he was thrown to Earth where the shepherds found him. So that's why the

farmers ended up putting him supposedly in the field or that was the idea behind

it. The Romans adopted this practice from the Greeks too. All right. Let's continue.  Now

we go sometime later you know during the Middle Ages small children were

sometimes employed as real-life scarecrows and used to chase away birds

by making noise and hitting pots or sometimes throwing rocks at them. Okay.  Good.

However many plagues lowered the population in the Middle Ages and there

weren't quite as many children around.  Remember back then you know.  this was

this was an agrarian society. So they had a lot of farms and stuff for you know,

growing food for the people. And suddenly the children kind  of ... a lot of children

disappeared with when the plagues eliminated a lot of people. So basically

the farmers you know started thinking of other ideas. Okay. So let's continue here.

Yeah. Farmers started making scarecrows out of straw like the ones we see today

and clothes and and old clothes. And sometimes a gourd or a turnip for the

face or for the head. Okay,  which used to be the head. So this kind of worked. So

this is where the first scarecrows started to be made. And you know,  more

looking like what we see is our modern-day scarecrows. All right.  And  we just

have one example sentence to show how we use it today. So nowadays scarecrows are

used as a form of ... more of a form of a decoration around Halloween. You know,

they have a lot of other ways to keep away birds and stuff. And they have

pesticides today. So they don't use ...  there's not as many real scarecrows out

there anymore.  But we still see scarecrows at least in

the US. Always you know,  as decorations around Halloween. Anyway I hope you got it.

I hope you found it  informative and interesting. Thank you for your time. Bye-