"give the bird" (Merrie Melodies, 1942)

[Jonathan Lighter]

I remember asking myelf the same question thirty-five years ago, when the
"finger" sense of "the bird" was still brand-new to me.

My conclusion was that the intended sense cannot be determined from the
cartoon.

My feeling (and that's all it is) is that if the "bird" was so widely
recognized as the "finger" in 1942 that it could be mentioned on screen, it
was equally the case that the gesture  was so obscene that the Hays Office
wouldn't have permitted a reference to it, particularly in a children's
cartoon.

The idea of "vile language" would have been OK, however, because it could
cover almost anything. In 1942, "god damn" and "bastard," for example, were
still proscribed.

JL

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      "give the bird" (Merrie Melodies, 1942)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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