[Ads-l] Where are the PC police?

[Jonathan Lighter]

In the year 1968 I purchased, in NYC, a novelty button that read, "CHICKEN
LITTLE WAS RIGHT."

It has served me well ever since.

On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 7:00 PM, Robin Hamilton <
robin.hamilton3 at virginmedia.com> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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