True Blue --now "CHICKEN"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 11/14/2006 10:37 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
>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?

Does some faint memory tell me that cooked elderly Galli are not
called "chickens"?  What's the case in French (from which, as Wamba
said, come all English words for what's on the table rather than
what's on the farm)?

Joel

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