Polly Wanna Cracker?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lee from Philadelphia.

Hello, Lee.

Hi, Lee.

Hi.

What are you calling about?

Well, my wife and I have this big green Amazon parrot

That during the summertime we’ll take with us in its cage

To go sit outside and have a cup of coffee with us.

Wait, your parrot drinks coffee?

Well, no, but we do.

He sits on the table and speaks to passersby

In both English and maybe Portuguese.

His first owners were Brazilian.

Oh, too big.

It may sound like Portuguese to us, but I don’t speak Portuguese.

And he loves the attention, and people come up, and they wave at him, and so on and so forth.

But nearly everybody who comes up to see him says, Paulie, want a cracker?

And his name’s not Paulie.

His name’s Alexander Hamilton.

We named him after the founder of the Federal Reserve System.

Because he’s green or what?

Well, no, because my wife has this thing for Alexander Hamilton.

And she thinks he’s one of the most important founding fathers

And doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

And so a parent is an appropriate tribute.

That’s right.

And usually, like, if we know someone well enough to come to our house,

They know enough not to say, Paulie, want a cracker.

What do you do when they say that for the first time?

Do you correct them? Do you punch them?

Well, it isn’t really correcting them.

I mean, he probably does want a cracker.

He probably wants lots of other stuff, too.

But we say, you know, his name’s not Paulie.

It’s Alex or Alexander Hamilton, if we’re going formal.

And then we start talking, and there’s stories back and forth.

But it’s amazing.

Everybody says Paulie want a cracker.

This has been going on for a very long time.

Let’s talk about Paulie for a second.

Paulie is a kind of newer form of Paul, P-O-L-L,

Which was a nickname for parrots as far back as the 1600s.

So we’re talking 400 years of parrots being typically called Paul

And a little later, Paulie, which comes from the name for a woman, Paulie.

-huh.

But the part that is interesting is what is the deal with the one at Cracker?

I’m with you on this.

It is incredibly annoying because people will do it 99 times out of 100.

The first use that I can find is a cartoon published in a humorous publication called The John Donkey.

John Donkey.

John Donkey.

Yeah.

And it’s a cartoon that shows a boy about to hit a parrot with a stick.

And the caption underneath is, Polly, want a Cracker?

And my impression is that clearly the boy was sick of people saying,

Polly want a cracker also.

No, I don’t know.

Or he could be cracking the parrot on the head.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that’s the joke.

I think the joke is very, very broad and not subtle at all.

And it’s about making a joke that he’s going to crack the parrot.

So my guess is that even by 1848, this was a pat-set phrase in English.

And that’s in New York.

That’s a New York publication.

But wouldn’t you think that the joke would be about actually giving the bird a cracker and that crackers were hard biscuits that sailors took to sea with them?

Well, yeah, but there’s a pun there to be had on a cracker being a crack with a stick, cracking him over the head with a stick.

That’s the pun.

Yeah, I guess we should explain what a cracker is as well.

It’s basically what we eat today only in a more crude or rude form, right?

Not your saltine, something a little thicker and more like unleavened dough, right?

Mm—

In any case, but a year later in December 1849, there’s something really interesting.

There’s an article that appears in a fake newspaper that is published in The Knickerbocker, which is a magazine from New York, New York City.

And this fake newspaper is called The Buncombe Flagstaff and Independent Echo.

And the whole thing is all satirical articles in this fake dialect with intentional misspellings and just kind of like low and colloquial speech that’s meant to be humorous.

And in there, again, this is 1849, is a fake classified ad.

And it says, for sale, a Paul parrot.

So it’s Polly without the Y, P-O-L-L, parrot, cheap.

He says a remarkable variety of words and phrases, cries, fire, fire, and you rascal.

And Polly, want a cracker?

And would not be parted with, but having been brought up with a sea captain, he is profane and swears too much for the subscriber.

The subscriber meaning the person who put the ad in the paper.

So by this point, I think the joke was around enough that people would get the idea that this is the thing that parrots say.

Everyone knows by 1848, 1849 that parrots say Polly want a cracker.

So that’s as far back as I can trace it.

150 years, that’s a really long time for something like this to be going on, don’t you think?

It is.

So somewhere it actually became sort of standard by then.

Yeah. Polly always does want a cracker, though, doesn’t he?

Well, Alex will always eat a cracker and just about anything else that you give him, as long as it’s not meat.

How old is Alex?

He’s five.

So he’s got a long road ahead of him then, right?

Well, he’ll live to be in his 60s.

Really?

Yeah.

In his 60s?

Parrots of this type can easily live 60, maybe 70 years.

Well, Lee, this has been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for your call, Lee.

Thanks.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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