"wingery"

[Charles Doyle]

Within the past 2 or 3 years, a dozen or more small restaurants called "wingeries" have opened in the vacinity of the University of Georgia. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder whether it's merely a local term.

It isn't, of course, although the word does not appear in the OED or even in UrbanDictionary.com.

The proponderance of non-recent Google hits for "wingery" show the phrases "left wingery" or "right wingery" or simply "wingery" in the derived sense of 'political bias or extremism' (OED omits "wingery" in that sense as well).  However, Google Books calls up Garrison Keillor's 1989 collection _We Are Still Married_: ". . . arriving at The Buffalo Wingery . . .' (p. 57); the proper name makes clear the reference of "wingery" to the popularized "Buffalo Wings"--some marketing genius's scheme to charge a high price for the what had been, traditionally, the least desirable part of the chicken (cf. the urban legend that KFC bred a headless/footless/wingless fowl).

--Charlie
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