A few days ago I wrote about the word “chicken.” Later, I got to thinking about all the ways we use chicken in our everyday language and sometimes some of our language doesn’t use the actual word chicken, but its relationship to chicken(s) is readily apparent.
Earlier, I mentioned that to “be chicken” means to “be afraid.” But in addition to that, chicken feed has come to mean a small amount of money and we often (probably not politically correctly) refer to a girl or woman as a chick. If someone is chicken hearted, he’s not brave and to play chicken is a game of stand off, to see who will give first. When I was in school, my teachers often referred to my poor handwriting as chicken scratch.
I’ve always heard that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket or count your chickens before they hatch and my grandmother always said that if something was hard to come by it was scarce as hen’s teeth. My grandmother also used to say shake a tail feather, which meant to get moving. If something or someone annoys you, it ruffles your feathers and you probably think they are a dumb cluck or a bird brain. But if you over react, you may have egg on you face, but you shouldn’t brood over it. We all know people that are like a chicken with it’s head cut off and we often walk on eggshells when we’re around them.
We live in a world where there is a pecking order and a lot of people want to rule the roost. When someone is just not nice, we say they’re a bad egg. A mother hen is someone that is very protective and if you’re very angry, you’re madder than a wet hen. If you’re out of here or gone, you flew the coop. And if you’ve read this far and are disappointed…. well, maybe this blog just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
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