It starts here in the mornings. Tactile writing, coffee drinking, thoughts becoming notes. A glance to the left reveals cobwebs in the corners.

I need to do something about those cobwebs.

Cobwebs are just abandoned spider webs. They are sticky and everything clings to them, from dust to casual detritus moved by the wind. The etymology of the word ‘cobweb’ is interesting, even mentioning J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” (1937).

The word ‘cobweb’ persists to this day and yet it doesn’t seem reasonable. We clean ‘cobwebs’, but it would be easier to just say ‘webs’. It lingers like a cobweb itself, passed down from generation to generation and used almost completely disparately from spiderweb. I remember wondering as a child about where they came from, and if someone had just said they were spiderwebs, I likely wouldn’t have gotten into etymology at all – back when we needed books instead of websites.

The etymology of ‘cob’ by itself is interesting:

a word or set of identical words with a wide range of meanings, many seeming to derive from notions of “heap, lump, rounded object,” also “head,” and metaphoric extensions of both. With its cognates in other Germanic languages, of uncertain origin and development.

I use a nearby broom to remove the cobwebs.
I drink my coffee to remove the cobwebs.
I write on paper to remove the cobwebs.

With the cobwebs removed, I write new webs.