Has it ever happened to you to ask this question and be taken aback by the answer? To me, it has. Actually, it happened right one week ago or so, at home.
I live in a house of three men and they all have (no joke) three or four bikes each. Most of them are kept indoors. So it is a no-brainer that tools and toolboxes are to be found here and there, in every corner of the house.
The bright side of this is that every day I acknowledge the existence of a new object and oftentimes I learn its name in English straight away: I open my Ludwig translation page, I type the word and there it goes. I did some quick maths and with this little method I learnt 20 new words last month. Which is great, considering the zero effort and the fact that now I can fix a bike in English.
However, the word that blew my mind when I asked my boyfriend about it was ‘screwdriver’. It went somehow like this:
“Say, what’s the name for the pointy thing you use to stick those weird shaped nails to their holes?”
“...”
“You know what I mean!”
“The screwdriver?”
“Screwdriver?”
“Screwdriver. It drives the screws, you see.”
From Screwdriver to Pigs
Now, you must understand that for those who had access to English through literary studies such as myself, screw is a very bad word for sex workers, and its derivatives, like “screw it” or “screwed”, are all idioms used to insult people.
It made me giggle for a while, to imagine my true understanding of a screwdriver, which involved a taxi driver especially designed for sex workers that would drive them out and about from one client to the other.
As a gen Z would put it, “ I was today years old” when I learnt that screw was also a:
short, slender, sharp-pointed metal pin with a raised helical thread running round it and a slotted head, used to join things together by being rotated so that it pierces wood or other material and is held tightly in place.
Nevertheless, I was too curious to understand what happened to this word to become such a widespread insult that, apparently, has been around since the 1860s.
The origins of this one are rather uncertain. There are some interesting theories on it though. and others trace it to Latin scrofa, which means “breeding sow”, meaning a female pig bred for mating. The latin word scrofa is used for meaning sow only from Medieval times; prior to that, it meant "digger", then it probably passed to the animal due to the habit of the swine of rooting.
The mainstream meaning of "metal pin or tapered bolt with a spiral ridge, used to join articles of wood or metal," (Online Etymology Dictionary) is found at use from 1620s, while the meaning “the action of twisting to one side or the other” has been in use since the beginning of the 18th Century.
Screw also developed a sense of “oppression and coercion”, that comes from the early 17th Century. That one probably comes from the instruments of torture like the thumbscrews (if you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t want to know). Same thing goes for the usage of the word for meaning “prison guard”, because of the key they were famous to carry around (and screw meant also “key” back then, in the XX century). In a similar way, students would use “screw” for a highly demanding professor.
The slang that made ‘screw’ mean "an act of copulation" exists from the early 1930s, while weirdly enough, the association with ‘prostitute' existed since more than a Century before.
No Pigtails
Interestingly enough, the word originally comes from a pig, and as I acknowledged it, I took it for granted that it was all connected to the shape of the tail of the animal, that to me perfectly resembled a screw. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any proof of my naive yet fun etymology thesis.
What we know for sure, is that the act of screwing has, since the birth of it, meant the act of inserting something into something else, since the Latin word scrofa derives from an indo-European root indicating the act of digging and rooting. It comes then without much surprise then that the sexual innuendo has somehow haunted a word that brings with itself the sense of oppression, penetration or twisting.
Etymology research is always a bountiful journey, whether it confirms your theories or totally destroys them. Have you ever encountered a word whose meaning or etymology you would have never imagined?
