A silly joke about a parrot made the rounds of 19th-century American newspaper, and may be the source for our expression “cry uncle,” meaning “to give up.” This is part of a complete episode.
Leave a comment
2 comments
More from this show
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
This explanation, of all you have ever given, seems the most contrived. Why was being used as the word for the parrot? This seems more like a joke based on an existing expression — which brings me to the theory I accept…
In “How The Irish Invented Slang,” by Daniel Cassidy, he claims that the Gaelic word for mercy is “anacal” (loosely pronounced ahna-kaal). The influx of Irish immigrants is what brought this saying to America, as well as a book of other expressions. Most of these expressions were not written in literature, so it’s easy for their origins to be lost