What Appalachian Folk Call Scorpions

           When my grandmother was still alive (God rest her soul), she used to talk about scorpions being all over the house. I found that a bit odd, given that scorpions are a venomous arachnid not native to West Virginia in the slightest. In fact, all my life I had never seen a scorpion run across the linoleum of the kitchen floor.  
 

             One day, I saw a lizard with a blue tail (later found to be a blue-tailed skink) run across the porch, to which my grandmother pointed and said "there's one of them scorpions again". This puzzled me, because for all I knew, these were lizards, certainly not arachnids. But the truth of this matter is, lots of older folk in WV and elsewhere called these lizards scorpions, because back in the day they believed them to be venomous.  

              The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Montgomery & Heinmiller, 2021), has an entry about scorpions, which I will reproduce here for conveniance. 

scorpion noun

A Variant form scorpon

1942  Hall Phonetics Smoky Mts 65.

B A blue-tailed skink, (Eumecs spp.), mistakenly regarded as venomous. 

              An alternate name for the blue-tailed skink among the Appalachians was fence-scorpion (Montgomery &Heinmiller, 2021). 

An interest bit of Appalachian dialect for y'all. 


Dalton L. Miller 
3/28/2022

References

Montgomery, M., N., H. J. K., Hall, J. H., Hall, J. S., & Montgomery, M. (2021). Dictionary of Southern appalachian English. The University of North Carolina Press.