A couple of days ago, I heard someone say, “ I don’t mean to be a pest, but….” I remember when I was a kid, I was often told not to be a pest. I had forgotten that it seemed to be a common phrase at one time, but I hadn’t heard it used in a long time.
The way that the phrase was used the other day, and the way I remember it from my childhood, the term pest referred to a bothersome person. Today when I hear the term, I usually think of a bug, or something that you’d call an exterminator for.
I looked it up and the dictionary defined pest as: a plague, pestilence, epidemic; an annoying, harmful, often destructive creature; an annoying person; one who, or that which, is troublesome, noxious, mischievous, or destructive; a nuisance.
So “pest” usually refers to an unwanted, bothersome person, and — I suppose, it could refer to an unwanted, bothersome bug. But if you check the origin of the word, it was defined as a ”destructive or harmful insect” before it was defined as an “annoying person.”
But the latin root of the word is pestis, meaning “deadly contagious disease.” In fact, during the late Middle Ages, when the bubonic plague killed a third of all humans, it was commonly known as “the pest.”
This is just another example of how our language continues to change — today, with more than 100,000 people dying every day, we no longer call it a pest — we call it COVID-19.
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