«The little things that run the world»: insetti a confronto attraverso modi di dire in latino, italiano, inglese

This paper explores the idiomatic expressions involving an insect as a source and a human being or their activities as a target across three languages – Latin, Italian, English. To scan their development through time we have opted for the use of three historic dictionaries as our reference, i.e. TLL, GDLI and OED. The analysis pursues several purposes: to determine and quantify the number of insects and idiomatic expressions synchronically and diachronically; to establish a comparison between the uses in the different languages; to discover common and culturally specific traits in how the three languages perceive the nature of insects, which have an impact on the sentiment regarding them; finally, to prove if there are anthropological, psychological and cognitive facets responsible for the sentiment entertained about insects.