scarecrow

Long before the word turned into a Halloween costume, it named a job: somebody standing in a field to scare birds. That image is wonderfully literal, almost comic—old clothes, straw stuffing, a human outline doing the dirty work of agriculture while crows eye the crop from a safe distance. The first half of the word goes back to Old Norse skirra, “frighten” or even “shun,” while the second half is the cawing bird itself, the old English crawe, a sound-name as blunt as a crow’s call at dawn. The whole thing belongs to a family of spooky English words with odd histories—scare, fright, bugbear, even bug in its earlier sense of something frightening. By the 1590s, English speakers were already using scarecrow for a lanky, ridiculous person, which feels about right: the thing meant to look human ends up making humans look a little silly.