Hey, it’s the vernal equinox! It’s springtime!
Ha. Sure, the days are going to be longer than the nights now, but if you’re from any northern climate zone, you know that it’s more light than heat. And you can expect the slow thaw to be shot through with bursts of cold. Don’t put away your winter clothes yet – it’s a trap. Spring? More like springe. Don’t be a woodcock!
For those not at home with Hamlet, I’ll explain the reference. In act I, scene iii, Ophelia is telling her father, Polonius, about the vows Hamlet has made to her, and Polonius snorts, “Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.” As it happens, this turn of phrase didn’t originate with Shakespeare’s 1603 play; the Oxford English Dictionary has earlier quotations, including one from 1579: “Cupide sets vpp a Springe for Woodcockes, which are entangled ere they discrie the line.” You can see it means a trap for fools or the unsuspecting.
Specifically, a springe is a snare trap using a bent branch and a noose, and when it’s tripped the noose catches the creature – in this case a woodcock – and hoists it. If springe looks like spring, there’s a reason for that: it’s really a variant of the same word (and, by the way, spring meaning bouncy or tensioned thing, spring meaning the season after winter, and spring meaning water source are all the same word, just set to different specific aspects of ‘leaping forth’). But don’t get caught out: springe does indeed rhyme with hinge.
And a woodcock? Well, leaving aside any double entendre, it is a bird – specifically a kind of sandpiper of the genus Scolopax, and closely related to the snipe – and, like the sandpiper, finds its food by stabbing the sand. Etymologically, woodcock really does just mean ‘forest rooster’. But the relevant point here is that the woodcock is, by reputation, rather stupid or foolish, such that woodcock was by Elizabethan times a term for a fool, dupe, sucker, simpleton, what have you. Also, the literal woodcock is, by reputation, good eatin’ – a fine little game bird. Which is why you would want to set springes to catch them in the first place.
That’s not the only way to catch them, though. Hunters would gladly go a-hunting for them and their near kin. They would employ dogs to flush them out of the shrubbery – specifically cocker spaniels; that’s why they’re called cocker spaniels, because they’re for flushing out woodcocks (which they may do with a little help from their friends, but they’re not Joe Cocker spaniels). Were you thinking that perhaps they would use springer spaniels for that? Indeed, springer spaniels were also meant for springing – flushing out – game birds, but mainly larger ones, which is why springer spaniels are larger. And note that this springer and springing are like spring, not like springe.
Incidentally, once the birds are sprung, they still must be shot. Keep your rifle cocked. I can’t tell you just how difficult it is to hit a woodcock, but I can tell you that their cousins the snipes famously require skilled shooters to hit. That is why we have the term sniper: originally a word for someone who could hit a snipe; then a term more generally for a sharpshooter; now a term specifically for someone who shoots with care and precision at people – with the verb snipe backformed from it.
I swear, I’m not pulling a fast one on you here! I am not springeing you like a woodcock, nor am I taking you on a snipe hunt (which, by the way, as you may know, is not a hunt for actual snipes but is a prank played on summer campers, scouts, and similar young woodcocks, who are sent out on a wild chase looking for something called a snipe that is certainly not a wading bird). The word snipe truly is an Old English word from an Old Norse word for the bird, and might have originated in a reference to its snout – that is, its needle beak, suitable for stabbing the sand in search of worms to hoist, sort of like how frost stabs its way into spring to springe you like woodcock as you set out underclad. No need to get heated; I am just trying to shed some light on the subject.
Oh, by the way. Polonius says a little more than what I quoted as he warns Ophelia against Hamlet’s affections. Ah, a little more? Polonius is famously prolix: his brief advice to her stretches 21 lines. Here are his opening few lines:
Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know,
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both
Even in their promise as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire.
Oh, say – are you more used to the phrase being “more heat than light,” typically used to mean “generating more emotion than understanding”? That’s a credulous reversal of the original, which, as you can see, means “giving a lot of show but not much real value.” Or, I guess, as Hamlet said, “words, words, words.”
…Huh, would you look at the time. We’re halfway between the winter of our discontent and glorious summer. I should take my leave now…
Sesquiotica 