First posted April 2006

In English the word “pupa” is the stage of life of an insect.  For example between being a caterpillar and being a butterfly the stage where this kind of insect morphs is called its pupal stage.

This is the idea of Carl Linneas who in the 1750s came up with the classification system we still use today for plants and animals.  He borrowed the Latin word for “girl” pupa which also meant “doll” in Latin.  He did it in a documented format so we know who to blame, but the traces on a number of other related words are not quite so well established, but the traces are there just the same and the connections are pretty believable.

In Latin it’s easy to see how the word for girl might be applied also to a doll.  I mean its more often girls who play with dolls and today we certainly call our own little girls dolls, living dolls.

In fact our big girls too sometimes.

Since French grew out of vulgar Latin the links to their word for doll poupée are also clear.

“Puppet” didn’t appear until the mid 1500s and before that it had been “poppet.”  The movie Pirates of the Caribbean has Keira Knightley’s character Elizabeth Swann being called a poppet by the kidnapping pirates.

Then as today we think of a puppet not only as a plaything, but as a representation of a person that is actually controlled by a real person behind the scenes.  Political puppets are actual people controlled by someone behind the scenes.

Keira Knightley was being called a poppet though, because another old meaning of the word is a dainty, pretty girl.

Now Keira Knightley is no dog but it turns out that puppet is a word related to what we call young dogs.  In the middle ages lap dogs were also called poupée because they were thought of as playthings—not working dogs.  Poupée morphed to puppy and so with time any little dog began to be called a puppy.