[Ads-l] Where are the PC police?

[Robin Hamilton]

It's worse than that, even, Wilson, since there's a degree of gender-bending
involved in making the protagonist male:

I quote myself from some long-ago notes:

<<   The second version of the narrative to be written down [the earliest
version is Scots, and begins with a hen], with the initial figure now a younger
barnyard fowl named Chicken Licken, was that of James Orchard Halliwell-Philips
(as he was finally known by the end of his life), Shakespearean scholar, and
anthologist of nursery rhymes and folk tales. Halliwell-Philips introduces
Chicken Licken in his 1849 anthology. It is here for the first time that the
protagonist is named Chicken Licken, while it is now an acorn [not a pea, as in
the earlier Scottish version] which falls on the creature’s head:

“As Chicken-Licken went one day to the wood, an acorn fell upon her poor bald
pate, and she thought the sky had fallen. So she said she would go and tell the
king that the sky had fallen …”

This was the version which was to dominate the British strand of the tale.   >>

Or so I once seem to have averred.

As to why she's called Chicken Little in America ... well, children, that's
another story.

Robin Hamilton


> 
>     On 17 September 2016 at 20:44 Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Chicken Little (2005) - IMDb
>     www.imdb.com/title/tt0371606/
>     IMDb
>     Rating: 5.8/10 - ‎64,469 votes
>     Animation · After ruining _his_ reputation with the town, a courageous
>     _chicken_ must come to the rescue of _his_ fellow citizens when aliens
>     start an invasion.
> 
> 
>     When did chickens - not to mention honeybees, wasps, hornets, cows, etc. -
>     become *male*? No less a light than Seth MacFarlane has even portrayed
>     bulls as having udders.
> 
>     Is it becoming the case that, in English, _male_ v. _female_ is relevant
>     only WRT personkind?
> 
>     --
>     -Wilson
>     -----
>     All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
>     come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>     -Mark Twain
> 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org