“Whistling girls and cackling hens always come to some bad end,” said people in the olden days regarding transgressive women. A variation on this saying pops up in a 1911 book called Folk-Lore of Women by one Reverend Thomas Thiselton-Dyer. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Whistling Girls”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Patty calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
Hello, Patty.
Yeah, how you doing?
Hiya, Patty.
Oh, and Martha, too.
I decided to show up today.
Hi, Martha.
Close the door.
What can we help you with, Patty?
Well, I have a question for you.
I have this saying that I’ve said my whole life, and I thought everyone knew it.
And I walked into work and my administrative assistant was behind the desk, you know, kind of whistling away.
And I said, Jodi, whistling girls and cackling hens always come to some bad end.
You know, that’s the thing that I’ve always known.
And she looked at me like quizzically and went, what?
I think that needs a dun-dun-dun after it.
Sounds ominous.
And the camera’s zooming in up close.
Yeah.
And then she said, whatever.
And then I looked over at Jim, who is my manager, who’s about, you know, a little younger, but about my age.
He knows everything and he remembers everything.
And so I marched into his office and I said, Jim, have you ever heard this?
He said, what? And I said, whistling girls, cackling hens always come to some bad end.
He went, actually, no.
So you’re the only one in your office who knows this expression.
Yeah.
Well, it’s interesting because there’s an earlier and more common version of that that goes something like a whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God or men.
Or men.
God nor men, rather.
And the idea here, yeah, I think the idea here is that it’s something transgressive, a whistling woman and a crowing hen.
You don’t have a crowing hen because that’s the male’s job, you know, that’s the rooster’s job.
And same for a whistling woman.
That’s just being out of place.
She’s drawing attention to herself and not being quiet and demure and waiting to do so she’s spoken to.
She’s taking on the masculine role there.
But when there’s a transformation to the new version of this, there’s a couple other things that have come into play here.
The whistling has long been seen as bad luck.
And also a cackling hen may be the one that draws attention to itself when somebody’s looking for a hen for dinner.
Oh, interesting.
So this is all kind of added on later.
People started to assume that that’s what was meant by it.
That, like, if you go in the hen house and you’re looking for a hen for dinner, the one who’s cackling is the one you’re going to look at and pick and throttle and pluck.
Oh, okay.
So it’s not a long, not what I thought, like a gossiping.
Well, that’s part of it, certainly.
This is what we find with proverbs, that they tend to take on multiple meanings, and they kind of, people have their own interpretations of them.
But, yeah, that’s also in there.
Yeah, I’m going to recommend to you a book that you can find online.
You can read it online.
It’s called Folklore of Women.
You can find the whole thing online, and it’s by one Reverend Thomas Firminger Thistleton Dyer, who was an English clergyman in the 19th century.
And he has a ton of these expressions.
And it is just a great catalog of all the negative things that have been said about women being talkative.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you guys.
I just love your show.
Oh, thank you very much.
Take care now.
I hope you’ll turn the rest of your office on to it.
Bye-bye.
I will.
Bye.
Bye, guys.
Bye-bye.
Well, give us a whistle at 877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
