Word of the Week: Cricket

An interesting incident took place on a train recently. As we were approaching a station, the lady sitting next to me made to get up and, as she uncrossed her legs, her stockings rubbed together and emitted a loud crackling sound. "Aha!" I thought to myself. "Cricket season."

That's how crickets make their distinctive chirruping sound, you see – by rubbing their legs together. The keen entomologists among you will point out that the lady sitting next to me on the train couldn't have been a cricket because the females don't chirrup. The chirrup is a male thing, designed as a mating call to attract females. Imagine walking past a million building sites at once, girls. That's what a female cricket has to endure on a warm evening in Kuala Lumpur.

But it's a dangerous game being a cricket. When they're not being served up as food by lizard keepers and Asian street vendors, they attract all sorts of predators in the wild. There's one particular parasite that likes to feed on male crickets from the inside out and is attracted to them by their chirrup. Some crickets have been found to have given up chirruping so the parasites can't find them. The sad thing is the females can't find them either. Like trappist monks, they've been forced to choose between sex and life and have opted for life, albeit a life of loneliness and silence.

This is just one of many fascinating facts about crickets. And here's another: they make excellent thermometers.

That's right, thermometers.

Their chirruping, you see, is temperature sensitive, so as the mercury rises, so does the intensity of their chirrup. A 19th century American physicist and inventor called Amos Dolbear noticed this phenomenon and formulated his own theory, later known as Dolbear's Law, that by counting the number of chirrups per minute of a field cricket, subtracting 40, dividing by four and adding 50, you would get the temperature in fahrenheit. It had to be a field cricket because different crickets chirrup at different rates too.

I'm not making this up.

Dolbear's Law was found to be accurate to within one degree fahrenheit, though it proved impractical anywhere north of the 55th parallel, beyond which the cricket always died of hypothermia.

Dolbear was one of those 19th century inventors who could have been a household name but became overshadowed by the likes of Edison, Marconi and Bell for reasons possibly connected to his mad, staring eyes and scary beard (see photo). Mind you, that may have been taken seconds after he learned that his telephone patent claim against Marconi had been thrown out of court. Despite pioneering some important aspects in the development of the telephone and electric lighting, Dolbear was doomed only ever to be introduced as "the man who invented the cricket thermometer." Ho hum.

The cricket has a prominent place in human culture. There's Jiminy Cricket, of course, Pinocchio's orthopterous, top hat wearing conscience, and The Crickets, who backed Buddy Holly and nearly called themselves the Beetles (partly inspiring The Beatles in their choice of name). In Brazil, the chirrup of a cricket is taken to be a sign of impending rain, or a financial windfall, or illness, or death, depending on the colour of the cricket.

It's a similar story in Barbados, where one type of cricket heralds money coming in, while another is regarded as a harbinger of death. Hence, in the Caribbean you'll often hear the locals say, "I don't like cricket," and then, on discovering that it's a money cricket, adding, "I love it!"

And you thought that 10cc song was referring to the game of cricket.

Easy mistake to make, on account of the two words being exactly the same. Could they be in anyway related? Surprisingly not. The insect gets its name from the Old French 'criquer', to creak – a reference to its creaky chirrup. The game is thought to have arrived in England from the Low Countries, where the Flemish used the word 'cricke' for a stick or staff.

Cricket comes with a catalogue of facts almost as fascinating as that of the cricket. Did you know, for example, that Aleppo, the war-torn Syrian city, was the first place that cricket is reported to have been played abroad by English expats? That was way back in 1676. They could do with a bit of cricket now, to calm things down.

Like meditation or living with a cat, cricket teaches us to slow down, unwind, let go, stop striving, tune into nature and reach a higher plain of consciousness (sometimes known as sleep). In the 16th century, cricket became popular as a relaxing antidote to religious persecution and torture. Today it offers similar respite from the horror of 24 hour rolling news.

As the football season creaks to a disappointingly inconsequential conclusion, it's a relief to discover that the cricket season is already under way to carry us soothingly through the summer months. In fact, it has been since April 1st, when the Dolbear cricket thermometer chirrupped 8?C and rain stopped play just about everywhere. You have to admire their optimism.

The other cricket season doesn't start until late July in this country and the little critters have generally done their mating and retired to the great pavilion in the sky by the time the last ball is bowled at the end of September. So if you hear the rasp of a cricket any time between October and June, it's probably just a lady in stockings preparing to get off at Vauxhall.

Balance doesn't do mating calls but it can help you make your customers swoon.