A silly joke about a parrot made the rounds of 19th-century American newspapers and may be the source for our expression “cry uncle,” meaning “to give up.” The anecdote features a boastful owner who orders a pet parrot to speak the word “uncle” but the bird refuses. The angry owner locks the animal inside a chicken coop and when the owner returns later, he discovers a massacre—the parrot killed all the hens except one. The parrot stands over the sole survivor and yells the exact same command at the hen to force a surrender: “Say uncle!”This is part of a complete episode.
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Just to get it on the record here, Daniel Cassidy’s book is terrible and not to be trusted, and his supposed etymology of “cry uncle” is a bad one. Here’s my takedown of his awful book: https://grantbarrett.com/humdinger-of-a-bad-irish-scholar/