Fang

Fang - F A N G - the elongated teeth of the classic Hammer Horror and Universal Studios film character. It may come from the Old English and the Old Norse - a grasping or capture, the act of seizing. It has been stated, after a study of 10,000 words in 1975, that words from Old Norse make up about 5% of those 10,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that there are 170,000 words in current use with 47,000 words no longer in use. I think it has already been mentioned that the name of a Starbuckian coffee shop has come from a Scandinavian country.

(Fang)

Back to fang, the word, can be used to describe the large sharp tooth of an animal. The canine teeth of a dog or canine. Hence, I guess, the name of that tooth but it is also the tooth of a venomous animal, poison is injected by the snake as it buries its fangs in the flesh of the victim. Also, the spider has fangs too in which it kills its prey with venom coming from the fangs. 

Was it Ricky Gervais who talked about the venom of a crane fly or a Daddy Long Legs? But if you delve further, the truth comes out like venom from a fang. The term venomous means that an animal has specific glands to produce venom that is passed through a duct connected to fangs. But poisonous means that the animal has a gland that creates a poison that kills its victims by touching it or eating the poison within the animal. There are two types of Daddy Long Legs, one belongs to the Opilionid family and does not have venomous glands or fangs. The other Daddy Long Legs, known as a Long-Legged Cellar Spider (Pholcus phalagioides)  that belongs to the Pholcidae family may have venom but it has not been tested on mammals and it does have fangs but they are quite short. The use of the fang and a second tooth creates a form of tong-like feature, known as uncate. These Daddy Long Legs tend to wrap their prey so do not need to inject venom through the fangs. But it is a great stand up routine by Mr. Gervais. 

If FANG is an acronym, it represents four major tech companies. You will probably know or even are a daily user of Facebook (now known as Meta), Amazon (the online store, streaming service and server provider), Netflix (another streaming service for television and film products) and finally Google (now known as Alphabet). 

(FANG)

Those who recently saw the film Mad Max Furiosa or maybe rewatched Mad Max Fury Road may recall the phrase “Fang it!”. This phrase means to push the accelerator to the floor, full throttle or floor it, to drive at speed with little regard for safety and in a potentially aggressive manner to show who is the better driver in the desert of the Fury Road. Pushing your vehicle to the limits, it is reminiscent of Aussie saying from the 1970’s or 80’s. It also may have its origin from one of the greatest racing drivers from the the 1950’s, Juan Manuel Fangio who had five World Championships between1950-1958. Michael Schumacher said that “Fangio is on a level much higher than I see myself…”

(Fangio)

Fang can also describe a form of Bantu ethnic group from Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon and southern Cameroon, They make up 85% of the population in Equatorial Guinea and also known as Fãn or Pahouin and they speak the Fang language and preserve their history through a musical oral tradition. Some say they came to Equatorial Guinea from the Upper Nile valley. Although this is still disputed. They came prey to the trans Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade and were described as cannibals due to human skulls and bones found in boxes in their homes, it turned out that these were the remains of the ancestors. Some of their specific reliquary heads had a characteristic heart shape and concave face with a large bulbous forehead and covered in a black patina. The music for their oral tradition of history was created by a mvet. This was a form of string zither with four strings and a resonator. The "mvet" player would pass through village once a month to play at council meetings. 

(Reliquary Heads of the Fang People)

So this four letter word describes the elongated fangs of animals, vampires, spiders, a collective of tech companies, the technical term based on a race driver’s courage and an ethnic group who were falsely described as cannibals.