“A Bug in the Ear”

The proverbial expression “to put a bug in your ear,” meaning to implant an idea in your mind, originates from the belief that insects called “earwigs” frequently creep into people’s ears. There is, indeed, an insect called an earwig, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as a “nocturnal insect … usually herbivorous.” The encyclopedia also notes “a widespread, but unfounded, superstition that earwigs crawl into the ears of sleeping people.”

But just as the name “woodchuck” misleads people to speak of “woodchucks chucking wood,” the name “earwig” has perpetuated a fear of insects crawling around in the auditory canals. And this belief has been encouraged further by a common urban legend.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) —the Bible of every word watcher—traces the word “earwig,” meaning “ear-insect,” to Old English and Middle English prototypes that look like the modern word as it might be spelled by someone with an insect buzzing in his ear: earwicgan, eorwicga , and so forth. The OED dates “the notion that it penetrates into the head through the ear” to as early as the year 1000.

In the most common modern version of the story, a woman is lying on a beach, when a tiny earwig slips into her ear and crawls straight ahead as far as possible. The woman leaves the beach unawares. But several days later, she suffers an intense earache, and goes to a doctor for an examination.

“Hmmm. He’s too far in to grab,” the doctor says. “We’ll just have to wait. He’ll work his way through and come out the other side. ”

But the doctor has made a big mistake. Weeks later, when the insect emerges from the woman’s other ear, the “he” bug turns out to be a “she.” So the doctor offers a revised opinion. “I’m afraid this female earwig may have laid eggs in your head. If so, they’ll hatch and eventually eat out your brain.”

The doctor’s lack of regard for the woman’s initial problem and his grim diagnosis later on give this away as an urban legend. Besides, how can an herbivorous insect get from the ear canal into the brain and then back to the ear canal on the other side of the head? The other thing I’ve always wondered about is whether medical students take entomology courses in college just so they will be able to distinguish male from female earwigs when the need arises.

To return to the metaphorical “bug in your ear,” the OED also records the verb “to earwig,” meaning to pester, influence, or bias a person by insinuating yourself (like an earwig) into his confidence.

Which brings me to a recent manifestation of the legend in popular culture. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn , a big film hit a few years back, the villainous Kahn insinuates space creatures into the ears of two Starship Reliant (sister ship of the Enterprise ) officers in order to make the officers obey his commands.

In the summer of 1982, when the film was first released, a newspaper editor in Boise, Idaho, remembered an eleven-year-old local news item about an earwig. The editor revived the item, which he found in the paper’s back file, and it was sent out by Associated Press as a sort of footnote to the Star Trek film. The story was that in 1971, when the Boise area was infested with earwigs, a woman in Boise consulted her doctor about an intense earache. Using forceps, the doctor extracted what the news story reports as an earwig from her ear.

In the years that I have been collecting versions of the earwig story, I have also heard from four other people who claim a firsthand knowledge of a family member who had an earwig in his or her ear. Considering the earwig’s exaggerated reputation for ear crawling, this doesn’t really seem to be a problem of epidemic proportions.

Such rare and random occurrences of earwigs getting into people’s ears have little connection to the bug-in-the-ear legend, apart from making it seem more plausible to those few who know about the experiences. An earwig is really no more likely to crawl into a person’s ear than an ant or a spider. The fact that the Associated Press regarded the Boise event as national news testifies to its unlikelihood.

So while an earwig can indeed crawl into a person’s ear, it seems that a place has to be pretty darn earwiggy for such a thing to happen by chance. And one has to be positively smothering in fear of earwigginess to flee the beach for fear of earwigs.

I found those wacky, wonderful words, earwiggy and earwigginess , in the OED too, but they have not been used in English since the 1870s. Let me put this bug in your ear: How about introducing both words back into current usage?

But don’t believe the story about female earwigs laying eggs in the middle of someone’s brain. That’s just another urban legend.

Footnote: After my earwig column appeared, a number of people wrote to describe their recollections of an old television thriller apparently based on the earwig legend. Most people agreed that Laurence Harvey played a role in which he tried to kill a man by having an earwig placed into his ear. But the plan went awry, and the Harvey character himself received the earwig implant. It turned out to be a female insect that crawled through the head and left eggs in the brain .

What my correspondents were not so sure about was when the show was aired or on what series the episode appeared. Their guesses ranged from ten to twenty years ago and either in “Night Gallery,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Thriller,” or “The Twilight Zone.” I looked it up (the envelope please), and the correct answer is: “Night Gallery” episode entitled “The Caterpillar,” broadcast March 1, 1972.

Final footnote (I hope): A high-school class in Elkton, Maryland, wrote to send me the lyrics of a song called “Earwig” by a punk-rock group called the Dead Milkmen. Its most memorable, much-repeated line is “You got an earwig, crawling towards your brain.”

Thanks, class.