![]() As they hit, glass broke and a fender flew off and the cars skidded wildly. I'll drive mine, we'll have a chicken fight.' The two cars spurted at each other, head-on. Sailor Off The Bremen Stories: 'Get into yer cab, Angelo. The protagonist, Studs Lonigan, says, "He was the skinny, dark-haired punk around the corner who was so chicken, wasn't he." Green also notes the use of "chicken fight" in 1940: Farrell's 1935 novel Judgement Day, which takes place in the 1920s. For the adjective, Green points to James T. Though the weak-willed meaning survived in compounds like chicken-hearted and chicken-livered, standalone chicken (as a noun or adjective) did not become a reliable stand-in for cowardice until the 20th century, in streetwise American slang. Godwin Caleb Williams: You are not such a chicken as to suppose, if so be as you are innocent, that that will make your game altogether sure. Kemp Nine Days' Wonder: It did him good to have ill words of a hoddy doddy! a hebber de hoy!, a chicken! a squib.ġ844 Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit: Why, what a chicken you are! You are not afraid of being robbed, are you?įrom a coward one moves on to a weak or naïve person.ġ794 W. The first example we have of chicken meaning a coward comes in 1600. Jonathon Green, author of the magisterial three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang, recently gave a nice historical overview of the cowardly connotations of chicken on Quora: In my latest column for the Wall Street Journal, I take a look at how political stare-downs earned this appellation, and how chickens became animalistic symbols of cowardice in the first place. With the government shutdown over and the default crisis averted, what many commentators called a "game of chicken" has finally ended on Capitol Hill. ![]()
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