maggot [LME] A photograph has been circulated on the internet purporting to show a man with maggots in the brain. The maggots were just an urban myth—one story said that the condition resulted from eating the Japanese raw-fish dish sashimi; another that it resulted from swimming in water where parasitic fish could enter the urinary tract (the candiru, a small catfish of the Amazon basin, does occasionally do this). The scare was new, but not the idea. When the Gothic novelist Charlotte Dacre published Zofloya, or the Moor in 1806, with its plot of murder and a Satanic lover, a reviewer pronounced that she must be ‘afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain’. Maggot is probably an alteration of the earlier word maddock, meaning ‘maggot’ or ‘earthworm’, influenced by Maggot or Magot, pet forms of the names Margery or Margaret. Compare pie.