Actions

Work Header

Weaver? I hardly know 'er!

Chapter 2: Glossary

Summary:

I would feel bad dropping entomology/sewing jargon on y’all and leaving you to figure it out yourselves, so here’s some easily digestible definitions. I love science communication!!!

Chapter Text

Warp and weft: respectively the y and x axes of woven fabric. The warp is all of the vertical threads on the loom, and the weft is all of the horizontal threads. When Vib thought that he didn’t want to “risk warping the weft”, that was a pun. (Is it funny now that I’ve explained it? No?)

Antennae (singular: antenna): you know, those little twiggy things on a bug’s head. What you might not know is that they’re sensory organs, specifically chemoreceptors. That means they can detect chemicals in the air, which is the primary way that insects communicate!

Spinneret: the organ spiders make silk with. When Philly says she spun the silk “with [her] own two spinnerets”, it’s a figure of speech like “I made it with my own two hands”. Spiders usually have six spinnerets, so that’s probably how many she has, but it doesn’t really matter. The exact number isn’t an important part of her design.

Setae [sea-tay] (singular: seta [sea-tuh]): bristle like hairs. Not exclusively a bug thing.

Okay this last one isn’t really a definition, but I wanna explain Nephilomena’s name. It’s a portmanteau of the name Philomena, and Nephila. Nephila is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning “love of spinning” (in reference to thread), but Nephila is also a genus of orb weaver spiders, though a lot of species in the genus were moved to the genus Trichonephila in 2020. You can find me talking about some of them here and here. I am forcing you to look at my dragons.

Notes:

Philly’s hands are usually folded up when she’s not using them, which is based on actual mantis arms, no weird god magic involved!
Here's some more art of him https://www.tumblr.com/bug-gender-art/796958556690710528

Series this work belongs to: