Midway through Edward Albee’s 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” the aggrieved housewife Martha delivers one of several withering denunciations of her husband George, a college professor who has the countenance of a milksop. “So, here I am,” Martha begins, “stuck with this flop, this bog in the history department, who’s married to the president’s daughter, who’s expected to be somebody, not just a nobody, a bookworm.”

As an adolescent in the 1990s, when I first watched the classic film version of the play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, I was always struck by Martha’s use of the word “bookworm.” As enunciated with a tone of high dudgeon by Taylor, the seemingly innocuous word became sinister. One pictured an insidious insect that had taken up residence in the library stacks, slithering through the collected works of Henry Adams.