Halloween on a Sunday, AACCCKKKKK!!!!!

[wuapinmon]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

A segment on NPR said today that the origins of Halloween are the public's past loathing of disabled and unattractive people. This may be some NPR drivel. I don't know. There was no source cited, except the commentator, himself a quadraplegic, said that the root of "creepy" is "crippled". Anyway, it's another perspective on Halloween. Its darker side, as it were.

f. CRIPPLE n. Cf. Ger. krüppeln

CREEP, v. (root of CREEPY)
[A common Teutonic strong vb.: OE. créopan = OS. criopan, OFris. kriapa (NFris. krepen, Satl. kriope), ON. krjúpa (Sw. krypa, Da. krybe):OTeut. *kreupan. As with some other verbs of the same class (cf. BOW, BROOK, LOUT), the present has in some of the langs. ú for eu, as OLG. krúpan, MDu. crúpen, Du. kruipen, MLG., LG. and EFris. krûpen, MG. krûfen, kraufen. In OHG. replaced by chriohhan, MHG. and mod.Ger. kriechen, repr. a type kreukan, the relation of which to kreupan is uncertain.

I'm a romance language guy, so Germanic linguistics is way outside my field, but I don't see the two as being perfect matches according to the OED.

If anything, the root of crippled comes from the idea that a crippled person has to creep along the ground, but the first recorded usage of "creepy" in print, to define something that causes the hairs to stand on end, isn't until the 1830s, which would be a decidedly modern usage compared to the Old English and German usages of creep and crippled.