Portage River Farm
Notes on our struggles and successes on our family farm in rural Michigan.
(Pinckney, Michigan)
04 Mar Wed 2009
Chicken Talk
Etymology has always fascinated me. I could read about the origins of words and phrases all day. Lately I have been studying everything that there is to know about chickens in preparation for our upcoming coop building project and I have been surprised at the number of common phrases that we use that relate to chickens!
Apparently chickens are very hierarchical. From an early age they begin squabbling until they have worked out where each of them stands in the dominance structure of the flock. I have heard the term "pecking order" many times relating to dogs and people but never connected the fact that it originated with this behavior in chickens.
The hierarchy in the flock is usually topped by a rooster. In the case of a flock with a very young or very old rooster, the top of the hierarchy will be held by an older hen instead. In this case, the female dominated rooster is referred to as "hen-pecked".
Roosters have an elaborate set of gestures and postures that they use to convey dominance and to challenge other roosters or potentially dangerous strangers. One of these postures involves the rooster subtly moving in a sideways direction toward the offending individual while seeming to stare fixedly at something on the ground. All the while the rooster is actually staring down his opponent with the one eye facing him. This behavior is referred to as being "cock-eyed".
This last one is mostly my own conjecture. I have been learning that chickens have a wide range of sounds that they use to communicate. Among these sounds is one that a chicken will make when they see a large bird flying overhead. In that case the chicken sounds the alarm for the flock to take cover by literally shouting "HAWK!"
That leads me to think about that odd sounding English word that we use for those winged predators. I have checked the etymological explanations in the dictionary and really don't see anything that would dispute the possibility that some early ancestor or ours may have begun referring to the birds going after her chickens by the term suggested by the squawking livestock themselves. Hawk! Hawk!
I may be wrong, but I kind of like the notion that we might be carrying at least one word in the modern English language that is a borrow-word from chicken-ish!
Apparently chickens are very hierarchical. From an early age they begin squabbling until they have worked out where each of them stands in the dominance structure of the flock. I have heard the term "pecking order" many times relating to dogs and people but never connected the fact that it originated with this behavior in chickens.
The hierarchy in the flock is usually topped by a rooster. In the case of a flock with a very young or very old rooster, the top of the hierarchy will be held by an older hen instead. In this case, the female dominated rooster is referred to as "hen-pecked".
Roosters have an elaborate set of gestures and postures that they use to convey dominance and to challenge other roosters or potentially dangerous strangers. One of these postures involves the rooster subtly moving in a sideways direction toward the offending individual while seeming to stare fixedly at something on the ground. All the while the rooster is actually staring down his opponent with the one eye facing him. This behavior is referred to as being "cock-eyed".
This last one is mostly my own conjecture. I have been learning that chickens have a wide range of sounds that they use to communicate. Among these sounds is one that a chicken will make when they see a large bird flying overhead. In that case the chicken sounds the alarm for the flock to take cover by literally shouting "HAWK!"
That leads me to think about that odd sounding English word that we use for those winged predators. I have checked the etymological explanations in the dictionary and really don't see anything that would dispute the possibility that some early ancestor or ours may have begun referring to the birds going after her chickens by the term suggested by the squawking livestock themselves. Hawk! Hawk!
I may be wrong, but I kind of like the notion that we might be carrying at least one word in the modern English language that is a borrow-word from chicken-ish!
John_3
11:00 PM EST