Adders and the Addle Pated

Getting close to departure for England.  I'm at the point at where I am steering clear of runny nosed people, even adorable grand children.  It's no fun to be sick far from home.  Once I'm on the ground in rural Northumbria the Things to Worry About shift.  Bad weather of course.  Aches and pains, one assumes.  And adders.  

In our part of Wisconsin there are no venomous snakes.  And if I happen to stray south a bit I  know what a rattlesnake looks like.  I won't bother them, they won't bother me.  But adders, those lone venomous critters of the British Isles (sans Ireland, thanks Pat!), well I don't know what they look like or how they behave.  Here's a picture to help me with the identification:

Got it.  They look enough like rattlers to encourage a wide berth.

But one thing leads to another, and I got to wondering if there was a connection between the words Adder and Addled.  Seems pretty close.  But......nah.

Adder has a long and distinguished history.  It seems most medieval cultures had a similar word for serpent.  I figure the whole Garden of Eden case got them disproportionate attention.  In Gothic the word was nadrs.  In German it was, and still is, natter.  The various dialects of Old English being derived from Germanic sources the word was similar.  At some point a typo occurred, and "a nadder" became "an adder".

The most famous modern use of the word comes from the British classic "Blackadder", in which the scheming titular character always had a side kick named Baldrick, who could charitably be described as "addle pated".

"Pate" refers to one's head.  It derives from the Latin "patina" which means dish and also gives us the word pan.

My initial assumption that addle had a connection with a low crawling reptile, well, I was wrong.  It's considerably worse than that, and I don't feel obliged to recount it.  Lets let it be with the observation that it was not too far removed from the noxious insult that was unearthed at Vindolanda a couple of seasons back.  I think Secundinus and Baldrick had qualities in common.....