Bookworm

As I indicated yesterday, a bookworm is a person who loves to read and spends a great deal of time doing it. There is a great deal of folk etymology surrounding this word. Folk etymology for those of you who don't know, is a commonly accepted, but difficult to verify origin of a word. In this case, the word bookworm is often said to be derived from the an actual insect that infects books. There is an insect (anobium or furniture beatle) that may also chow down on your favorite book, but it turns out that the holes that one might occasionally find in books are most likely not caused by a single so-called bookworm insect, but more likely by a host of insects including, I hate to say it, cockroach larvae and the insect silverfish. The application of bookworm to human beings is supposedly a connotation or metaphorical use (like we've already seen with the word rampant.) Some dispute this connection in that according to the OED, bookworm seems to have been first applied to humans and then was only later (1855 to be exact) applied to insects that devour the pages of a book).