Nancy in Newport, Kentucky, says friends used to refer to her young son and daughter as a pigeon pair. Doves and pigeons tend to have two chicks at a time, and at one point, it was believed that these offspring consisted of one male and female. Shakespeare alluded to a dove’s golden couplet, meaning such a pair. In Dutch, siblings are referred to with terms that translate as “a rich man’s wish” or a “king’s wish,” or even a koningspaar, which means “royal couple.” In French, they’re souhait de roi, or “king’s wish.” In Scots, a doos cleckin, or “dove’s hatching,” is a set of twins, usually fraternal. A pigeon pair refrigerator is a single-door refrigerator that stands beside a matching single-door upright freezer. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What’s a Pigeon Pair?”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Martha, my name is Nancy, and I’m calling from Newport, Kentucky.
Well, welcome to the show, Nancy. What can we do for you?
I was thinking about it one day, and I realized that I had heard something that I’ve never been able to figure out.
I had two children here, and the second child was a girl, the first boy.
Women, old women, I loved them very much, came and got little dresses for the girl.
During that time, I was frequently told by these women that I was so lucky to have a pigeon pair.
A pigeon pair?
Yes, a pigeon pair.
And so did you have them as a set?
Did you have boy and girl twins at once or separately?
I had them separately.
The boy was the elder.
And how far apart were they?
Four years.
Four years.
Okay.
And what did you take that to mean?
Did you ask them to explain?
My daughter was a very difficult child, and I never got around to asking them.
Unfortunately, they all became older and moved or died.
So you’ve got a boy and girl, and people call them a pigeon pair.
And so your question that you’ve wanted to know and have answered is, what in the world is a pigeon pair?
And then I assume that’s P-I-G-E-O-N.
Yes, sir. It is.
Yeah.
Well, there’s an answer, and it goes back to the likelihood that pigeons and doves, which are basically part of the same family of birds, usually have broods that are made of two eggs, two chicks.
And so at one point, it was believed that they were always male and female, and that they would go on to have a brood of their own.
And so if you have a pigeon pair of a boy and a girl, it’s like you are a pigeon.
You have one boy and one girl in your brood.
That is funny.
It goes back at least 200 years, probably much older than that.
There’s actually a lion in Hamlet that refers to doves and the fact that they have two eggs.
Typically, it’s something like as patient as the female dove when her golden couplets are disclosed, meaning when her two eggs are hatched.
How funny. How lovely.
I was an older mother, yeah.
This is not just in English that there are these terms.
In Dutch, a boy and girl pair is called a rich man’s wish, or a king’s wish, or even a koningsparter, which is a royal couple.
In French, it’s similar. It’s a suede roi, which is the king’s wish.
And then there’s a Scots term, and pardon me, I don’t speak Scots, which is a dialect of English, but it’s a dooscleckin, which is a Scots pronunciation of dove, doos, and cleckin, or clecking, which means hatching.
So it’s a dove’s hatching, a doosclecking, which means two.
And typically at birth of twins, but especially to the birth of male and female twins, the pair of them.
And, you know, it also gets applied to appliances.
Have you heard of a pigeon-pair fridge?
No, I have never heard that.
That’s a combination of an upright refrigerator with a single door and an upright freezer with a single door, and they come together and they match each other and kind of complement each other.
Pigeon-pair refrigerator, yes.
That’s new to me. I did not know that, a pigeon-pair refrigerator.
This area is largely Appalachian with a big influx of German and Irish, which can also be Appalachian.
And I thought I would have heard about a pigeon pear fridge.
That’s amazing.
Nancy, thank you for sharing your story about your own pigeon pear.
And call us again sometime, all right?
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye.
