GUETAPENS
Wild Word Friday!
I love to hear about the Scripps National Spelling Bee each year – hear about it, not watch it, because my heart aches too much for those who don’t quite make it to that coveted last-person-standing place of honor. The winner this year was Snigdha Nandipati, and the last word she spelled to win her crown was GUETAPENS. My desktop dictionary doesn’t even include GUETAPENS (pronounced get’-a-paw) in its more than 1700 pages. So I resorted to my computer where both the Wiktionary and Merriam Webster told me that GUETAPENS is a word derived from the Middle French word d’agais apensés, which means to conceive of. GUETAPENS means a premeditated ambush or a trap.
Years ago we rescued a couple of baby raccoons (They were drowning in a ditch.) and raised them until they could survive in the woods by themselves. They went through a phase at about three months old when they would hide under a couch or a bed and jump out and grab our ankles. They were great at staging a GUETAPENS, especially when we had guests. LOL. (Yeah, right.)
Have you ever been the victim of a GUETAPENS?
Blessings!
Sue
(Photos from Wikipedia.)
We have ‘doodle bugs’ down here. They make a cone-shaped depression in loose dirt and when an unwary ant or stick disturbs the soil, the spider jumps out to deliver the fatal blow! As kids, we used to take a fine piece of grass and try to get the spider to latch on! Of course, we had to say the apporiate poem while we were doodling in the
the GUETAPENS. I think the doodle was the same as the wolf spider.
Karen, That sounds like just the thing for kids to do! LOL.