Don’t get nettled!
Have you ever been stung by a stinging nettle?
I bet you have.
I’m sure I was as a youngster – more than once. And I’m equally sure I learned by the age of five or six how to identify and apply a dock leaf that would soothe and ease the sting.
That piece of inherited plant lore is the lone survivor (in my case) of the extensive medicine chest, figuratively speaking, or pharmacopeia that country people once held in their heads.
Nowadays we’re largely urbanised – about 85 per cent of people in the UK live in towns and cities. Nevertheless, farmland – which generally implies a rural or semi-rural setting – still accounts for 70 per cent of the UK’s total land. So it’s no surprise that many ancestral country traditions are still going strong, such as well-dressing, the media-attention-grabbing cheese-rolling – and the rather overlooked Sting-Nettle Day. Apparently, Sting-Nettle Day falls on 2 May in Sussex and in Devon on 3 May, following Kissing Day. An authoritative compendium of folk traditions notes that in 1880 in a Devonshire village (Bovey Tracey) all the children were provided with a nettle or bunch of nettles with which they would merrily flog each other.
History does not record why, and the origins of the Nettle Days in Sussex and Devon are a mystery lost in the proverbial mists of time.
But one reason must surely be that nettles once supplemented the diet of country people who struggled to put food on the table. My research tells me nettles are at their tenderest in March and April; they should never be eaten after May Day because that’s when the Devil makes his shirt from them. I’m told nettle soup is delicious, and I heard the other day about a wild garlic and nettle risotto. You can find plentiful advice on how to use nettles in your cooking here.
Apart from their role as a dietary supplement, another reason stinging nettles are honoured in this way must be their medicinal and health-giving properties. The leaves contain bone-building minerals, not to mention a wealth of vitamins. Nettles are also anti-inflammatory and, though it may seem paradoxical, have analgesic or pain-relieving properties. Some people swear by nettle tea as balm for arthritic pain.
The species of nettle we’re talking about here is Urtica dioica. The Urtica part is a direct borrowing from the Latin urtīca, ‘nettle’, which in turn is from ūrere, ‘to burn’. That makes sense. Ouch! Nettles do make your skin feel as if it’s burning. And that burning is expressed in the prefix to the Danish word for stinging nettles, brændenælder, Danish using the same verb for ‘to burn’ and ‘to sting’. That same Latin word urtīca is also the root of the technical name for nettle rash, urticaria.
The reason nettles burn and sting, of course, is that evolution has endowed them with this self-defence mechanism to deter herbivores from munching on them.
The word nettle is one we’ve inherited from Old English (OE) netele, related to Old High German nazza (Modern German Nessel). Given its medicinal properties, it’s not surprising the nettle first appears in OE writing above all in leech books, namely, books containing medical remedies and diagnoses, leech here being the OE word for a doctor or healer. Dock too is OE, docce, related to words in Middle Dutch and Old Danish.
Ultimately, nettle may, like net, be related to an Indo-European base word meaning ‘to bind, to tie together’ given that nettles have been used for weaving. Who knows whether the story mentioned earlier of the Devil weaving his shirt from nettles isn’t a folk memory of this?
An early verbing
Whatever the word’s ultimate etymology, it’s an earlyish example of verbing, that is, the conversion of a noun into a verb. By the first quarter of the fifteenth century, it was being used as a verb denoting ‘to beat or sting someone with nettles’. Using that ‘ouch’ literal meaning non-literally, Shakespeare has Harry Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1 declare, ‘Why look you, I am whipt & scourg’d with rods, / Netled, and stung with Pismires [ants]’.
In a perhaps more famous phrase in the same play, Shakespeare has the noun nettle come from Hotspur’s lips: ‘Out of this nettle danger, we plucke this flower safetie.’
It’s not hard to see how the ‘ouch’ of physical nettles endowed the verb with the meaning ‘to irritate, to annoy, to vex’, a use that quite probably arose at roughly the same time as the literal meaning was coined. The same metaphor of a stinging object causing irritation is what underlies the analogous verb to needle – though the noun needle had to wait till the nineteenth century to be verbed in that way.
Nettles being an integral part of country life and lore, it was inevitable they should be honoured with an idiomatic phrase or several. To say someone ‘has pissed on a nettle’ was a down-to-earth, highly graphic but now obsolete way of saying someone was in an extremely bad temper. ‘Sitting on nettles’ in Scots refers to being on tenterhooks in expectation of something.
And then there’s the incantatory rhyme or spell recited as you apply the dock leaf to the hurt. It has several variants such as ‘In dock, out nettle, don’t let the blood settle!’ or ‘Nettle out, dock in, Dock remove the nettle sting.’ The to and fro of the spell then made it a byword for inconstancy or fickleness such that Chaucer could write in his Troilus and Criseyde, ‘But kanstow pleyen raket to and fro, / Netle In, dokke out, now this, now þat Pandare,’ (But can you play racquets [tennis] to and fro, / Nettle in, dock out, now this, now that, Pandar).
Nettle poems
And talking of poetry, one might suppose nettles to be meagre subject matter for poetry. However, there are at least three classics that take the plant as their ostensible topic and develop it in different ways. Vernon Scannell’s Nettles, a GCSE text, examines the father–son relationship with a wealth of military metaphors. I particularly love his description of the nettles as ‘that regiment of hate behind the shed’. Tall Nettles by the Edwardian Poet Edward Thomas speaks of change, decay and unexpected beauty; and Neil Munro’s nostalgic Nettles is about the Highland Clearances. On a lighter note, there’s even a whole book of poems about nettles, one of which includes the cheery phrase ‘when climbing styles in optimistic shorts’, a classic case of the transferred epithet: the shorts are not optimistic, their wearers are.
As are we all, in the British climate, when we don our shorts. And if and when you wear them, do try to steer clear of Urtica dioica.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
