When I was a boy we would spend summers by the lake. There was an old boathouse and sometimes behind the squeaking doors I’d catch a glimpse of a big hairy dock spider.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

My mother was scared of these spiders and described them as “the size of dinner plates.”

Thus I tend to shudder when I think of tarantulas. Yet the resources I have been checking tell me that these ugly brutes are actually fairly harmless.

Perhaps I should take my own advice.  When my kids were little and we went on canoe trips and someone expressed their worry about bears I asked them what was the most dangerous animal in the world.

Answer: you are—people are the most dangerous animals.

The forgoing supports the thesis that I and my friends and family are strange and illogical.

But that’s okay because the etymology of tarantula shows that we are not the only ones.

There is a word tarantella that describes

“A very quick Neapolitan dance (or its music) in 6/8 time for one couple”

That’s from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which goes on to say that the name of this dance is

“said to have been based on the gyrations carried out by those whom the tarantula had bitten.”

The folklore evidently doesn’t tell us if the people (a couple I guess) gyrated because of the spider’s poison, or as some sources would have it, because physicians of the day claimed that dancing was a kind of antivenin to the spider bite.

Out of this four legged dancing for eight legged reasons came in 1938, according to The Oxford English Dictionary the word tarantism defined as

“a hysterical malady, characterized by an extreme impulse to dance.”

And I thought that was called disco.

All of these words point back to a town in Italy. The city of Taranto is located under the heel of the boot of Italy and it was the hairy spiders of this place that spread their strange and illogical webs of terror all over the world and all over our language.

This despite the fact that they don’t even spin webs.  They are a type of spider called a wolf spider that runs after and jumps on its prey.

Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better about them.

The city of Taranto in turn takes its name from a Greek related language, Illyrian, where darandos meant “oak tree.” A second theory on the town’s name is that it might come from an Indo-European root ter meaning a “flowing current.”