Tried to be facetious earlier today, pretending to have confused the new-to-me word hasp (fastening, clip) with asp. Unfortunately this attempt was marred by actual ignorance: for years I've thought that those narrow-waisted black wasps you see occasionally, the truly terrifying ones, are called asps. Maybe this is some bit of local dialect that I picked up, but if so I can't find any evidence for it.

So I'm not sure where this came from. I was definitely aware that the snake Cleopatra supposedly killed herself with was an asp.

Fun discovery though: the asp caterpillar, a wonderfully fuzzy guy that takes its name from its venomous spines.

Also someone referred to it in a forum as an "asap caterpillar" and as much as I like the way Language Log has expanded our vocabulary for speech errors, I like that this seems to be a real, old-fashioned thoughtless malapropism rather than a pail or an eggcorn or what-have-you.