Tastes like Chicken

So my sister received a Word-a-Day calendar for Christmas. Bored as I was (no Barbie Mansions to assemble anymore) I began to read through it.

I only got a little ways into the year, and it seemed like there were a lot of words having to do with "chicken," as if chicken were some far more profound and pervasive meme than I'd ever realized.

catchpole, n. a dude who goes after people that owe you money. Comes from the French for chicken-chaser or cache-poule. Pretty cool, huh? Good thing I never ever ever will use the word catchpole (not that I don't owe people money; I just tend to prefer the term "goomba" for the guy that roughs me up in the parking lot at Target)

pullulate v. To bud or sprout; to breed or reproduce freely; to teem or swawrm. Comes from the Latin pullus for young fowl. If you ever volunteered to take care of your 3rd grade classroom's 75 baby chicks for Columbus Day break, you can certainly see the connection for definition 3, "teeming." Baby chicks will swarm the shit out of wherever they are. I put them all in a shoe box while I changed the paper in their cage, and when I turned around, they had "teemed" all over my house. We were still finding dead chicks in the utility closet a year later. I silently and conspicuously returned like 12% of the litter I had taken home. Oh how the children glared.


poltroon, n.-- this is a great one, originally from Italian, poltrone, for big fat coward, originally, like "pullulate," from the Latin pullus. So it's a really foppy old fashiond way to say big chicken. Cut to Dartagnan running a scabbard through Big Bird, with a big, faggy "Poltroon!"


Isn't learning fun, if slightly off-color?