Miss Peggy had occasion the other day to walk into the shallow patch of woods that borders our back yard. After she came back, her lovely legs became covered with tiny dots of red, and she knew that she had picked up some chiggers in the underbrush.

I mentioned chiggers in a recent piece of writing, and I got this e-mailed reproach from David Lightsey of Mobile:

“I am a 63-year-old native Mobilian, and, growing up, we (family and friends) only called these irritating jokers ‘redbugs.’ At some point in my youth, I was talking to someone from north Alabama, or maybe Tennessee, who kept speaking of ‘chiggers.’ I asked him just what that was, and we finally realized that he was speaking of redbugs.”

David was a little disappointed that I had called them chiggers, figuring that all self-respecting Southerners called them redbugs. But I spent a little time in the Upper South, including Northeast Tennessee, so “chigger” and “redbug” were interchangeable in my vocabulary.

I figured “chigger” was the more widespread appellation, so I used it in my writing. I have dear friends on the Gulf Coast as well as in the Appalachians and, wishing to avoid giving offense to the redbug branch of the Southern linguistic tribe, I decided to find out what name to call those irritating little pests other than “@#$&*!”

I was raised amongst the chiggers, as my daddy used to say, and I learned to co-exist with them. You had to if you were to enjoy the treats of woods and fields offered by the Southland of my youth.

Every blackberry patch was a rich habitat for chiggers/redbugs. I learned early on to blow on a blackberry before popping it into my mouth. If I didn’t, I was liable to swallow an ant hiding within its sweet recesses, and maybe even a redbug. Maybe chiggers that rode blackberries down the digestive tract were among the causes of the frequent tummy troubles boys of my generation endured, but I wouldn’t want to blame it all on redbugs. There were too many other suspects to pin the blame on.

The itching, burning, red dots on your skin implanted by chiggers were the price you paid for wading into the briars and plucking the luscious berries. By the time Mama’n’em had made a batch of them into blackberry cobbler, the itchy dots had proliferated, but if there was anything that could make you forget the burning and itching, it was Mama’n’em’s blackberry cobbler.

Redbugs also loved to hang out in patches of gooseberries. My cousin, Maxine, recently reminisced about picking gooseberries in the woods that adorned a sandy ridge overlooking Horse Creek Valley, the area of South Carolina where we both grew up.

Bradley Kincaid, a mountain folk singer born in Kentucky, had a ballad called “How I Love Gooseberry Pie.” I never ate gooseberry pie, though I did enjoy picking the berries. I haven’t seen any gooseberry bushes lately, probably because the patches have all been bulldozed and turned into subdivisions.

I Googled “gooseberry” and came up with European and American versions, neither of which looked very much like the ones Maxine and I used to pick. They’re supposed to grow on thorny bushes, but I don’t remember any thorns. Maybe they were there but were wimps compared to the stickers on blackberries and the real honest thorns on rabbit-apple trees — which is the name by which I knew the hawthorn.

But even though our gooseberries were not memorable for thorns, they did harbor chiggers/redbugs.

Merriam Webster’s, in its ponderous way, defines the chigger as “a six-legged mite larva (family Trombiculidae) that sucks the blood of vertebrates and causes intense irritation.”

I never counted legs on chiggers, since the little buggers are so small you can barely see their bodies, much less their limbs. And I never knew they were larvae; I just figured they were bugs.

The American Heritage Dictionary says the pests are also known as chigoes, harvest bugs, harvest mites, jiggers and redbugs.

Some say “chigger” is just an alteration of “jigger.” To me, a jigger is the small glass I use to measure the tequila and triple sec for a margarita and the gin and vermouth for a martini. A chigger is the price you pay for a blackberry cobbler. But if you want to avoid any ambiguity about whether you’re measuring your spirits or scratching your itch, call it a redbug

“Chigoe,” I learned, is what redbugs are called down in the Caribbean. It’s a word from the language of the Galibi, the Carib people of French Guiana. The capital of French Guiana is Cayenne, which also is the name of a hot little pepper that comes in very small grains about the color of a chigger. Maybe that’s how the Galibi people came up with the name.

You’re probably itching for me to pass on an effective remedy for redbug bites. In my early years, we smeared turpentine on them, that potion being readily available through our neighbor, George Seigler, who had a turpentine still.

But then the girls in the household discovered nail polish. If you daub nail polish over the little red dots, it will harden and seal over the tiny holes left by the chigger. The larvae will be unable to breathe and will therefore suffocate. Serves the little buggers right.

The nail-polish remedy was the one Miss Peggy used, and I can tell you that it left her legs in good shape.

It works for both chiggers and redbugs, Dave.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.