Truly the best animals to play this game with are insects, we just have so many names for each. So! Today we are playing with WASPS! Good old wasps.
Notes for Further Reading!
Cacynen feirch: a livestock connection, so I'm guessing it's a farmer name from frustrated agricultural workers in August trying to keep their animals unbothered. But also, there's the etymology of 'cacynen' itself - from cach (shit) and ci (dog). Ci gets used fairly generically with Welsh animal names, but possibly the cach is from the old belief that bees, wasps and flies were born via spontaneous generation out of faeces, corpses and mud. Perhaps in Wales it was specifically believed to be from horse shit?
Cacynen felen: not much to say, they are yellow. Ooh, although, a fossilised example of a gendered colour term; you only see these in nature names now
Gwenynen feirch: the stinging fly that bothers horses. The verb gwanu means to stab/penetrate, so referring to the puncture-like nature of a wasp's sting
Cacynen y geifr: as with entry one, but goats instead of horses. I expect these came from farmers who worked different livestock
Cacynen fach: slightly odd because the common wasp is not that small. But it is smaller than many common species of Welsh bumblebee? Certainly smaller than hornets. Or possibly it's just a standard generic term.
Cacynen y cythraul: well WHAT a fun name. Cythraul is like... a demon, a devil, a creature from hell. Very evocative. Clearly, whoever came up with this one had a picnic ruined and was fucking livid about it.
Picwnen: from 'pig' (thorn) and 'cwn' (dogs). The '-en' ending shows it's singular and often creeps into Welsh words that technically had alternative singular/plural forms. A big example of this is fish, which used to be pysgod/pysg (singular/plural), but over time got hyper corrected to pysgodyn/pysgod because it sounded more correct
Piffgwnen: a corruption of the above (remember the cadno/canddo thing)
Piffgi: a further corruption of the above that has remembered the word 'cwn' is correctly singular-ised to 'ci'.
Cacynen frith: brith means, like, speckled/brindled/striped. Colour-marked. So referring to the stripes. Quite an old and poetic term that crops up a lot in nature names, just like cacynen felen, and also in old cookery terms (e.g. bara brith)
Okay! That's all you get! As ever, these are all true EXCEPT one. Also, I use a random number generator to decide where the fake one should go and how much explanation to give; and several people have started talking about red herrings, so remember! There are no red herrings. I'm not picking and choosing, these are genuine words except one. Beware of thinking you're seeing patterns in the options in these! It's you Vs etymology, not you Vs a standardised test. My logic ONLY plays into how well I can hide the fake, and I am randomising a lot of that process.
Good luck and happy clicking!
