What's this about?

[Dan Goncharoff]

Isn't Mother Carey and her chickens referring to the storm petrels in the
sense they are considered a sailor's savior, leading him back to safe land?
Similar to a guardian angel.

DanG

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:53 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      What's this about?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Mordecai Noah -- you've met him before -- responding to a rival editor who
> has claimed that the paragraphs in Noah's Star praising the goods and
> services from local merchants were paid for:
> ***  . . . we are not so lucky as to be paid for our puffs.  We do these
> things con amore.  We have to scramble on as well as we can -- not
> requiring, not asking aid.  We never had a "Mother Carey and her chickens"
> at our back from whom a few thousand could be borrowed for special purposes.
> . . .  ***
> Evening Star, June 8, 1839, p. 2, col. 2.
>
> I've looked for "Mother Carey's chickens" in the OED, and in Bartlett's
> Dictionary of Americanisms, Thornton's American Glossary, the Dictionary of
> Amerian English, the Dictionary of Americanisms, DARE, the Oxford Dictionary
> of Phrase & Fable, 2nd ed. (E. Knowles) and several recent editions of
> Brewer's dictionary, incl. the 2005 ed. by John Ayto.  When the term has
> shown up, it has been given the sense I know, the sea-birds called storm
> petrels, which can't be what Noah had in mind.
>
> I don't know of a person named Carey who might have been known to Noah as a
> bribe-giver, or sponsor of newspapers, or a merchant.
> Mathew Carey was a printer active in Philadelphia in the late 18th/early
> 19th C.  The American National Biography says of him: "Carey landed in
> Philadelphia with only a dozen guineas in his pocket. Lafayette heard of his
> predicament, sought him out, and loaned him $400 with which to start a
> newspaper. (When the marquis returned impoverished to America in 1824, Carey
> publicly repaid the loan.)"  The loan was evidently made in 1784 or 1785;
> however ostentatious Carey was in repaying the loan 40 years later, that was
> 13 years before Noah wrote this passage; Carey died in 1839, but in
> September, so his death couldn't have put this story into Noah's thoughts.
>  And he was the recipient, not the lender.  But still. . . .
>
> By the way -- is anyone among you all able to read Arabic?  I've just read
> at a story in which Noah represents a couple of Arabs who have been
> performing in an NYC theatre coming into his office to complain in Arabic
> that the theatre manager has stiffed them of their money.  Noah replies, in
> Arabic, that they are lucky that worse hasn't happened.  The purported
> Arabic is in our western alphabet, and doubtless was not transliterated
> according to any standard system.  Noah was a diplomat in his younger years,
> and involved in the suppression of the pirates operating out of Tunisia, but
> I don't know that this would have required that he learn Arabic.
>
> GAT (the guy who still looks stuff up in books)
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a new edition, though.
>
> ----
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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