True Blue --now "CHICKEN"

[Jonathan Lighter]

It may be that the distinction between "chicken" (young) and "fowl" (general) was rather unstable from the beginning, with "chicken" moving ever closer to "fowl" (gallinaceous) for reasons like those Charlie suggests. First the flesh, then the fowl.

  My reading of older English - probably not as extensive as Charlie's - is that "chicken" used to be used, even in the U.S., as a precise synonym for "chick," not just a "young" fowl but specifically an infant fowl. (Inhabitants of Delaware used to call themselves "The Blue Hen's Chickens.") As applied to the young of other birds, "chicken" seems to have gone extinct long ago (OED's last is 1651).

  JL





Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: True Blue --now "CHICKEN"
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The OED's first entry for "chicken" (n.1.1.a) is "The young of the domestic fowl; its flesh," with cited instances from c950-1858.

Some of the illustrative quotations do not OBVIOUSLY refer to YOUNG fowl--especially the references to the boiling or otherwise cooking of a chicken, "its flesh." Surely not all cooked chickens served on English (or Scottish) tables had been YOUNG at the time of their demise? Outside the circles of the rich, Englishmen must have cooked and eaten blown-out hens and impotent cocks; waste not, want not. Or does the dual reference of the OED entry suggest that a "domestic fowl" of advanced years, once it's plucked and put into the pot, reverts to the status of CHICKEN?

--Charlie

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