"give the bird" (Merrie Melodies, 1942)

[Ben Zimmer]

My son and I have been working our way through the "Looney Tunes
Golden Collection" DVD box set. Some of the Warner Bros. cartoons in
the set are restored from cuts later made for TV syndication. In
Robert Clampett's "A Tale of Two Kitties" (Merrie Melodies, 1942),
there's a line that I don't recall from my childhood viewings. In the
cartoon, two cats, Babbit and Catstello (based on Abbott and Costello,
of course), are pursuing a proto-Tweety canary bird in a nest atop a
tall tree. Babbit pushes Catstello up a ladder and then they have this
exchange:

B: Give me the bird! Give me the bird!
C: (to audience) If da Hays Office would only let me, I'd give him da
boid all right.

You can see it at 1:35 in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfyblox-p54

What did "give him the bird" mean in 1942? OED, HDAS, and GDoS all
suggest that it must have meant "express disapproval" or something
similar, based on "the bird" as theatrical slang for goose-like
hissing (discussed here in the past). The "middle finger" meaning
isn't attested until the '60s. So if this line was seen as needing
censorship in later syndication, it was probably because the "middle
finger" meaning got anachronistically read back on it. The Wikipedia
page for the cartoon makes the same (apparently false) interpretation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Kitties

So if we can safely assume that the "middle finger" reading is
anachronistic, and that "giving someone the bird" was an innocuous
expression at the time, why would Catstello have felt the need to
invoke the Hays Office? I'm guessing he meant that to "give (Babbit)
the bird" would have involved a stream of obscenities that the Hays
Office wouldn't allow. If that's the case, then this is perhaps an
interesting moment in the transformation of the term to refer to a
gestural rather than vocal obscenity. Thoughts?

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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