Nettercap noun a bad-tempered person, a garrulous person, a gossip.
‘“Who are you, to be callin’ my bairns thieves, ye maundering auld nettercap!”’ (The Fiery Cross)
Nettercap (also meaning spider, and occasionally daddy long-legs or cranefly) is first recorded with an ‘n’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. The word is a nice illustration of a process whereby, in this case, the final ‘n’ from a preceding indefinite article (such as ‘an’) is transferred to the following word. Nettercap derives from the better-attested forms attercap or ettercap. And ettercap is still used to mean spiders. ‘See yon Miss Muffet, that sat on a tuffet, feart o an ettercap Weel Andra an me, we baith agree, she seems a richt wee sap.’ (Margaret Tollick, Tapsalteerie and Ither Tales, 2008).
There is an early form eddercap, noted in 1741, in the Galick and English Vocabulary: ‘written for the use of charity schools ... in the Highlands’ by Alexander MacDonald. However, the word isn’t derived from Gaelic. It is first recorded in Old English as attorcoppa, a compound of attor ‘poison’ and coppa, usually interpreted as ‘round head’ (though coppa might also be an old term for spider, since the earlier form of cobweb was copweb). All spiders were traditionally seen as poisonous, which perhaps explains the rather curious title of the sonnets composed by the Scottish courtier-poet William Fowler called The Tarantula of Love, written between 1584-7 and describing what would probably now be aptly termed a ‘toxic relationship’.
However, (n)ettercap also means a bad-tempered person (possibly linked to the supposed poison of spiders to mean venomously spiteful) and this meaning has a long history too. One of the earliest records of the usage comes from c.1583 in Montgomerie’s Flyting with Polwart where someone is described as an ‘angrie Ettercoip’. John Buchan, in Witch Wood (1927) has a character referred to as a ‘thrawn ettercap’. And, somewhat more robustly, in Counterfeit Madam (2011) Pat McIntosh has a character declare: ‘At least we can see the old ettercap into the ground now, Christ be praised.’