- a company of plovers
- a kettle of hawks (not fish)
- a bevy of quail
- a murder of crows
- a descent of woodpeckers
- a peep of chickens
- a colony of penguins
The Birds and the Bees
The birds and the bees is a handy, sanitized way of semi-explaining sex to children. Especially at springtime, when both are easily seen—bees buzzing and pollinating and birds laying eggs and raising their young. Neither visual includes penetration (it’s not the birds and the dogs . . .), and the phrase is prettily alliterative. Tracing its first appearance is tricky, because some writers mentioned birds and bees in one work, but not together, or if in tandem, not as “the birds and the bees.” In 1825 poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “All nature seems at work . . . The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing.” In his 1928 song “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” Cole Porter wrote that “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. . . .” Some time in the 20th century the phrase became indelibly established in its present form, and in 1965 got a new lease on the facts of life via Jewel Akens’s hit song “The Birds and the Bees.”
More Wings
A wing chair has side projections from a high back; however, a three-way mirror isn’t called a wing mirror, which is a rear-view mirror projecting from a car’s side. A wing nut has small projections so one can turn it on a screw with one’s fingers; it’s also known as a butterfly nut.
Wingding, a lively party or youth-oriented happening (another very ’60s word), dates back to the 1920s, when it meant a spasm or seizure, usually via drug-taking. That “roaring” (like a lion?) decade saw a wider distribution of drugs, especially cocaine, after the huge losses and disillusionment of World War I (or the Great War, since WWII was yet to come, and of course “Great” meaning big, not excellent).
In soccer and hockey a winger is an attacking player. A wingman is a pilot whose plane is positioned behind and outside a formation’s lead aircraft. Wing commander is a Royal Air Force officer just below a group captain. Wing walking is—mostly was—performing acrobatics on the wing of an airborne craft. And a wingover, still seen at air shows, occurs when a pilot turns at the top of a steep climb and flies his plane back along its original route.
To wing someone with a firearm is to “merely” wound them in the arm or shoulder.
Left- and right-wing, politically, originated with France’s National Assembly (1789–1791), where the nobles sat to the president’s right and the commons to the left, the concept being that the former wanted to preserve rights for themselves while the latter wanted to grant rights to one and all.
(The first Academy Award for Best Picture was won by Wings [1927].)
Giving the Bird
The origins of to give or flip someone the bird are far from simple, partly because it goes back so far. The middle finger has been associated with the penis since at least ancient Greece (though in various cultures, like today’s Iran and Afghanistan, the thumb fills the same role). The Greeks also associated the penis with birds, one reason being the “nest” of pubic hair. In the West, certain birds have a long literary history of taunting other animals or humans. Hunters’ and soldiers’ arrows were sometimes compared to lethal birds. In the Middle Ages the French considered cutting off the middle fingers of English soldiers captured in France so they could no longer draw their longbows, which often used pheasant feathers. The expression to flip the bird is as recent as the 1960s, but the first photographed instance of same is an 1886 group photo of the Boston Beaneaters baseball team in which a pitcher is flashing his middle finger.
Getting the bird, seldom heard today, refers to someone, typically a performer, being rejected, usually by an audience. That is, they boo or hiss him, supposedly sounding like a hissing flock of geese. The original expression was to get the big bird. (On Sesame Street, Big Bird has a happy audience.)
Speaking of giving each other the bird, the term war hawk was coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1798 but the modern distinction between hawks and doves, used so often during the Vietnam war of the 1960s and early ’70s, dates only from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Feathers
The meaning of to ruffle someone’s feathers is obvious, and a feather in one’s cap comes from the Native American custom of awarding a feather to a courageous brave, as well as European traditions of adding ostrich or other feathers to winning warriors’ crests since at least the 1300s. Contrarily, starting in the 1700s a white feather was given to a man considered a coward or one who hadn’t enlisted in the military. This derived from the idea that a white feather in a game bird’s tail signified bad breeding.
But you could have knocked me over with a feather? Australian ornithologist Shelly Cantrell offers, “Assertions of surprise have long used animal imagery, but a diary that my great-grandmother kept in England said this one was new . . . it was much in vogue with her girlfriends yet disapproved of by most adults, presumably because it was a bit on the sensuous side.”
Featherbedding originally meant excessively generous or easy working conditions that made a job as comfortable as a feather-stuffed mattress. Today it means overstaffing, not stuffing—too many people employed for the work required (a common practice in Third World countries, to hold down unemployment and unrest).
Today birds of a feather merely connotes that like usually attracts like. Having things and attitudes and goals in common tends to bind any relationship. But centuries ago the phrase was derogatory, denoting that unsavory individuals—criminals, gamblers, promiscuous sorts, etc.—gather together in the same place.
To fly off the handle, or get upset, derives from medieval times when impatient falcons, kestrels, and other birds would fly off their “handles” or their owners’ gloved hands in search of prey.
By the way, birds don’t sweat. They haven’t any sweat glands. The most common ways they cool off are panting—like a dog, but much quieter—and ruffling their feathers, which lets in air and helps get rid of excess heat. (Reptiles, evolutionarily once related to birds, don’t sweat either.)
Ostrich
A ratite is a bird with a flat breastbone and no keel (a central ridge along the back or convex surface of an organ). Thus it cannot fly. The word has nothing to do with rats. Ostriches are ratites and do not bury their heads in the sand, an expression dating back to the Romans or before, symbolizing avoiding or denying an unpleasant reality. Rather, when ostriches sense approaching danger they put their long necks parallel to the ground and listen closely. If they feel threatened, ostriches can speed away at 40 miles (about 60 kilometers) per hour—they grow up to nine feet (2.74 meters) tall and 300 pounds (136 kg.), yet are quite agile.
The incorrect expression may also have developed because ostrich nests are just depressions scraped in the sand, and when mama tends to her eggs she lowers her little head way down. Nor are ostriches scaredy-cats, to coin a phrase. They’re formidable foes with sharp beaks and extremely powerful legs.
Birds. . .
Most avian expressions are self-explanatory, like free as a bird, a bird’s-eye view, the early bird gets the worm, or to kill two birds with one stone (fortunately usually impossible). Bird is also used to denote a specific type of person, for example, a jailbird or a rare bird or a tough old bird. A home bird prefers to stay in rather than go out. In Britain bird is the equivalent of American chick in regard to a young woman. Dolly bird is British slang for a good-looking but supposedly stupid young woman.
A golf birdie, as in a hole played in one stroke under par, derives from the 19th-century use of bird as slang for something good or excellent. In 1899 or 1921, depending on the source, an Atlantic City golfer said of a particularly good shot that it was a bird; his fellow players took up and amended the word to birdie. An eagle is a big birdie and a double eagle is three under par—and exceedingly rare.
Signifying an unnameable source, the expression a little bird told me goes b
ack to the Bible. (Of course a little bird is a birdie.)
The bird has flown means the individual you sought has disappeared. “The birds have flown,” declared Charles I in the 17th century when he and his soldiers arrived at the House of Commons too late to arrest his political adversaries.
One swallow does not make a summer goes back to ancient Greece and has equivalents in many languages. It usually warns not to arrive at a hasty conclusion or make too much of a single experience or episode.
Side note: Ever wonder why many birds sleep standing on one leg? First, their locking toes allow them to perch—one or two legs—on a telephone wire without falling off. Second, because they’ve no feathers on their feet, birds can lose body heat standing on cold surfaces or in cold water. To preserve energy they stand on just one leg. They also stick their heads under their feathers to conserve heat.
Chicks to Tits
Chick is a Middle English abbreviation of chicken, now usually denoting a young chicken or young woman. Not all words beginning with chick- are of fowl origin. For instance chickweed, chickpea (also known as garbanzo), and chickaree, a red-furred squirrel found in coniferous North American forests named for the sound of its call. Chick lit is fiction aimed at young women, chick flicks have the same target audience, and chicken feed is a negligible amount of money.
But a chicken brick is a pottery container for roasting a chicken in its own juices and chickadee is the North American name—also supposedly imitative of its call—for a tit or titmouse. Despite the name(s), a tit or titmouse is a small songbird that searches for food acrobatically among branches and foliage. Originally a titmose, its second syllable morphed into mouse. In Britain it’s more often called a tit, which also means a foolish person. As for tit for tat, that never had to do with the bird—it’s a 16th-century variation of the original tip for tat.
For the Birds’ Brain
Before there were automobiles, people riding in carts and carriages sometimes complained about the smell and bother of horsesh*t. Post-equus, people sometimes complain about birdsh*t, specifically droppings onto windshields or car bodies. “For the birds” is said to be shortened US Army slang devised toward the end of World War II, originally: “That’s sh*t for the birds,” that is, something worthless or worse.
Speaking of which, the dark dot in the middle of those white droppings is avian poo; the white is its sticky urine. Birds have no sphincter muscles and do #1 and 2 at the same time, from the same orifice. Is this too much information?
Birdbrain was a judgment both biased—small animal, small brain—and precipitate, prior to studies of birds’ brains (relatively big for their size) and their behavior. Animal intelligence is measured partly by successful adaptation to one’s environment—and birds have existed far longer than humans—plus factors such as tool use, which is known to several birds.
To eat like a bird is another misnomer, still current in the age of anorexia. If anything, birds tend toward necessary gluttony, requiring extra energy to sustain flight.
A harpy is a scolding or unpleasant woman. In Greek mythology harpies, meaning snatchers, were large birds with women’s faces and breasts who snatched food from tables and deliberately made an awful mess. (A harpy eagle is a crested eagle living in tropical rainforests.) Harridan, another sexist term for a disliked woman, may derive from a French word for an old horse.
Sirens, now betokening alluring women, were mythological nymphs whose sweet song drove men mad and to destruction. Sirens were often depicted as birds with beautiful women’s faces. In ancient times—Greek, biblical, etc.—women were often presented as destructive and frequently given animal traits.
Jaywalker
Jays, members of the crow family, usually with blue feathers, thrived along the east coast of what is now the US when European colonists arrived. As more and more arrived, most jays withdrew to the country. By the mid 1700s jay was a nickname for a country bumpkin. Rural visitors to growing cities were often baffled by the traffic, not knowing where or when to cross the street, and sometimes doing so without looking. By the early 20th century a jaywalker was what he or she is now. Today they really should know better.
A Regular Aviary
A coot is a black aquatic bird with a white bill that ascends onto its forehead as a horny shield. Calling a man a coot or old coot originally meant he was stupid or eccentric. Because coots have a featherless pate on the forehead that looks like an old man’s head, old coot became a derogatory term for an elderly man—and yielded the phrase “as bald as a coot,” or completely bald. (After Vivian Vance met the much older William Frawley, who was to play Ethel Mertz’s husband Fred on I Love Lucy, she told Lucille Ball, “Who’s ever going to believe I’d be married to that old coot?” Frawley overheard her, and the feud was on.)
Because larks are songbirds that seem cheerful, rise early (unlike night owls) and even sing on the wing, their associations are upbeat—to be up with the lark, to be happy as a lark, to lark about, to be larky, or to have a lark or do something for a lark.
Big, black, and raucous, crows have a contrasting image to larks. To crow over something is to gloat unattractively. An old crow is an ugly old woman. Crow’s feet—sounds more dramatic than, say, sparrow’s feet—eventually show up around men’s and women’s eyes. A crowbar’s splayed grappling end was said, by the 15th century, to resemble a crow’s foot or its beak. As the crow flies is a theoretical straight line between two points.
Four-and-twenty black birds, from the nursery rhyme, reminds us that once upon a time English, like German today, reverse-ordered numbers between twenty and one hundred.
Pigeons
This gray, usually larger relative of the dove has a very different image from the generally white, more delicate bird. A pigeon is a gullible individual, sometimes a scam victim. Pigeon-hearted signifies timid or cowardly.
Pigeon-toed means toes or feet turned inwards. Pigeon-chested or -breasted indicates a narrow, protruding chest.
In Britain one’s pigeon is one’s business or responsibility.
A pigeon pair meant girl-and-boy twins or a boy and girl as a family’s sole children, back when having “just” two was atypical.
Pigeon’s milk—better you don’t ask—is a curd-like secretion from a pigeon’s crop* (the pouch in a bird’s gullet in which food is stored or prepared for digestion) that it regurgitates and feeds to its offspring. A pouter pigeon can significantly inflate its crop.
A pigeon pea is a tropical red pea-like seed or the plant which produces it, used as fodder. Pigeon pie is slang for pigeon as an entrée, which it is in poorer countries such as Egypt.
A pigeonhole was first a small compartment for a pigeon to nest in. Then it was a small compartment in a desk. Then it came to mean placing someone into a restrictive category that kept their career or outlook small—as for example actors pigeonholed into playing only villains, kooky neighbors, or bird-brained blondes.
*Jabot, a French word used in English, means a bird’s crop but is the ornamental ruffle on the front of a shirt or blouse.
. . .Beating Around the Bush
The expression “the game is up” doesn’t derive from an old sporting event, but from hunting. Aristocrats hunting game on their country estates employed beaters to drive pheasants and other game birds out of their nests or hiding places and into the open. The beaters would yell, “The game is up!” to inform their employers that the birds were exposed and the shooting could begin.
That’s also the origin of beating around the bush, since beating branches and making noise flushed the game from the bush, allowing hunters to avoid directly approaching their quarry. This was routine for bird and boar hunting—to scare birds into the open, sometimes catching them in nets, and to avoid the surprise of a boar’s razor-sharp tusks or being charged. The practice was also called bushwhacking, but the original phrase was probably to beat about the bush, as it still is in Britain.
The possible first mention of the phrase was circa 144
0 in the anonymous medieval poem “Generydes—A Romance in Seven-line Stanzas”: “beting the bussh” (almost no standardization of spelling yet). In his 1572 Works George Gascoigne was the first to write “beat about the bush.”
Aviary II
Round robin now usually means a sporting tournament in which a player plays every other player in turn—a round-robin competition. Its earliest use, in the 16th century, was a nickname for a devious person. In the mid 17th century a round robin was a Roundhead, a supporter of Parliament in the English Civil War. Later it became a petition of complaint—often by sailors aboard ship—whose signatures formed a circle so to conceal the order of writing and not indicate a ringleader who could be held accountable and punished.
In Britain, “sick as a parrot” means being appalled by the outcome of a soccer (football) game. The phrase apparently became widespread after 1973, when several people in West Africa died of psittacosis, a viral disease of parrots and other birds that had rarely been transmitted to humans. The original expression may have been “sick as a parrot with a rubber beak,” denoting—like “a cat in hell without claws”—an animal left defenseless without a sharp weapon.
To quail, meaning to be afraid or apprehensive, has nothing to do with the cute little plump bird. And a culture vulture is a person avid for culture, which in a TV-oriented society is considered somewhat extreme.
Since ancient times the albatross, a very big seabird from the southern oceans, has been considered a bird of ill omen, in part because of its size and ability to successfully compete with fishermen. An albatross around one’s neck is a great burden—like a monkey on one’s back—very difficult to get rid of. The most famous example is in Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Albatross derives from Latin albus, white, and Spanish alcatraz (like the former San Francisco prison), which means gannet or its relative the pelican, but also a calla lily(!).
Many gulls aren’t seagulls, though we tend to think of them all as such and are often surprised to see one many miles inland or a bunch of “sea” gulls standing in the middle of a shopping-center parking lot (where there’s lots of litter for them to choose from). A gull is also a person who’s fooled or deceived; to gull is to fool or deceive. And gull-wings on a car or aircraft open upwards.
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