Chicken Second Joint

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is William from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hello, William.

How are things in Fort Worth?

Good.

Yeah?

Nice weather today.

Yeah?

All right, what’s up?

Well, your recent show on family terms brought to mind the phrase that my mother and her mother always used, and it was second joint. And that’s what they called the thigh of the chicken.

Oh, the thigh of the chicken.

And as long as I was a child and throughout the years they always referred to it that way, and I had never heard anybody else refer to it that way, until one day I caught a very old cooking show on PBS featuring Justin Wilson.

The Cajun chef, the Cajun cook, what did he call himself?

Exactly. He was like, you put a little onion in there and you put a little wine. He always poured lots of wine in there.

I guarantee.

I guarantee.

I’ve never seen this. This is great.

And he also referred to the thigh as the second joint.

Oh, interesting.

And I had never heard anybody outside of my family use that term.

That’s always a thrill, isn’t it, or startling when you hear something like that.

Yeah, and it brought back all those memories of, wow, that’s our family word.

How did you get a hold of that? And so does your family hail from Texas? Your mother and your grandmother are from Texas as well?

Yes, they were from the Houston area.

Which made me think, well, maybe it’s regionalism. Texas and Louisiana then.

Yes.

I’ve never heard that, Grant. Have you?

Oh, yes.

Besides the Cajun guy?

We didn’t use it in my family, but I know this from, don’t laugh at me, from reading the Dictionary of American Regional English as a pastime.

And there’s nobody, everybody’s like, well, of course, you big goober. You know what, William? It’s in there.

It’s in there, the Dictionary of American Regional English. When they sent out their questioners in the 1960s, a lot of words came back that had to do with food.

And they were able to, not only in their survey, get a lot of people who said it from around the country. It’s not regional, really. It seems to be used just a little bit everywhere by somebody.

But they were able to do a little digging in books and take it back to the 1850s. So it’s out some history, too.

However, I know for a fact that it’s a little older than that still. You can find it in cookbooks from the 1820s, second joint meaning thigh.

Now, why they called it that, I’ve got two ideas for you. The first one is that the second joint on the leg of a chicken kind of corresponds to our knee, right? Either it’s the second joint away from the body or the second joint up from the foot.

Right.

But the theory I like better, and the reason I remember this entry about second joint from the Dictionary of American Regional English, is that there’s one of the citations in there where they’ve quoted a person that they, you know, they spoke to her, they interviewed her, and she said that she thought that the reason that they called it second joint in her family is because it was a little improper to use the word thigh.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I have known some people in my time where certain words were off limits because they might refer to something that was a little too intimate on the human body.

And my grandmother was a proper southern lady.

Oh, was she now?

-huh.

William, did your grandmother have a word for the tail part, you know, the kind of fatty part?

Oh, yes.

That’s the parson’s nose.

The parson’s nose.

Very good.

Have you heard that one, Grant?

Yep.

As a matter of fact, isn’t it sometimes called the pope’s nose?

Sometimes the pope’s nose. Sometimes the parson’s nose.

And I love the term for this in French.

Oh, I don’t know that one.

It’s le soleilesse, which means only a silly person won’t eat it.

I’m just picturing your family sitting around eating Parsons noses and second joints.

Yes, well, I guess everybody has lots of terms for food because that’s so important.

Indeed.

Well, William, we’ve given you a little bit of history for the term. We showed you that it’s not just in your family. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be regional like you guessed, but that’s okay.

You’ll find that there are plenty of other people that know the term, too.

Well, that’s good because it’s been a long time since I’d heard anybody use it.

All right. Well, thank you so much for your call, sir.

Thank you for taking my call.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Best of luck.

Well, Martha, you know, he has made me hungry. I was thinking of my mom’s fried chicken. She does some good stuff with chicken, and my father’s mashed potatoes all buttered up.

Oh, oh.

Oh, we’re talking about Sunday lunch here or dinner.

-oh.

You and I have a food problem.

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