Opening a Can of Worms

You could be said to be “opening a can of worms”, figuratively speaking, if you are taking (or intending to take) some course of action that would have far reaching, often unforeseen, negative consequences.

For example, when British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the EU referendum in 2016, that was a can of worms that resulted in him resigning and the country bickering for 5 years and counting. A spicy can of worms to say the least (although whether those consequences were unforeseen depends on your outlook).

But anyway, let’s look at why we say it — why are worms in cans, and why would opening them result in a string of problems and negative effects?

Literal worms in literal cans

Prior to the invention of, and subsequent availability of, plastic containers, bait shops would sell live bait to fishermen in cans. Whether these cans are the same that we use for our food today is very unlikely, given that the worms would likely suffocate (yes, worms can suffocate) if sealed away like our baked beans are.

Then they wouldn’t be live bait anymore, would they. So no, these “cans” were probably more of a metal bucket with a handle.

Either way, as you can imagine those squirming worms would be a right pain getting back in the can if/when they got out, making the literal can of worms a problem unto itself, and therefore a fairly obvious association to be applied to anything else.

In possibly the oldest reference to this, Leona Dalrymple, in her 1914 work Diane of the Green Van, said:

“There are times, alas, when even fish are perverse! Thoroughly out of patience, Diane presently unjointed her rod, emptied the can of worms upon the bank, and returned to camp.”

The idiomatic expression is said to have originated from USA in the 1950s, but a far older alternative preceded it (and influenced it) by over 2500 years…

The box is a jar

The commonly accepted theory amongst linguists is that before “cans of worms” there was Pandora’s Box.

To “open Pandora’s Box” means very much the same sort of thing: doing something or taking some action that causes other (often unforeseen) circumstances.

Perhaps 20th century America felt it a little too abstract to be referencing Ancient Greek mythology, and thus modernised it with something from a more literal place. Who knows.

But turning to Pandora’s Box, the first thing to address is, actually, it wasn’t a box at all. The Greek word pithos was the correct term for what Pandora opened, which was actually a clay jar used to store wine, oil and human bodies for burial. We don’t say Pandora’s Jar due to the 16th Century philosopher Erasmus mistranslating the word as pyxis, instead, which means box. That word just stuck, it seems.

This story of Pandora was first written by Hesiod (an ancient Greek poet living and working somewhere around 700 BC), and goes something like this:

Prometheus steals fire from the Gods and presents it to humans as a gift. Angry about this for some reason, Zeus commands Hephaestus (Greek God of blacksmiths and whatnot) to mold the first woman as punishment to mankind, with other God’s contributing to her creation along the way.

Hesiod’s poem Works and Days tells of how she was given the “gift” of crafty speech, lies, and a “deceitful nature” and then, once complete, they called her:

“Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread” (81–2)

Pandora means “all-gift”, referring to the gifts each of the Gods gave her in creation, and in the fact she was a gift itself, albeit not a nice or well meaning one.

She was presented as a gift to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, who possessed a small jar (her box), which Pandora inevitably opened out of curiosity, unleashing all the evil in the world that it contained: death, illness, plagues, sickness, worms, Brexit, Sunday drivers — every evil thing you can think of. But she did manage to close the lid before hope could escape, so that’s something at least.

So basically, long story short, Hesiod wrote a poem to explain that life was just fine and dandy until women came along and messed everything up.

It’s similar to the Christian creation story, in which Eve (the first woman of the world, much like Pandora was in Greek myth) is tempted and takes a bite of the apple resulting in all of the world’s problems. Many historians now believe that the two share the same original source, although Pandora likely came first.

History, it would seem, isn’t just written by the victors, but also by bitter misogynists. Who’d of thunk it.

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Sources

• http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/01/origin-expression-open-can-worms/
• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can_of_worms
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora
• https://www.thoughtco.com/what-was-pandoras-box-118577