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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Not a dicky-bird
Not a sound; not an utterance.
A ‘dicky-bird’ might be of uncertain spelling - it is
variously spelled ‘dicky-bird’, ‘dickey-bird’, ‘dickybird’,
‘dickeybird’ and, when referring to the retired English
cricket umpire, ‘Dickie Bird’. The country of origin isn’t
at all uncertain; ‘dicky-birds’ are unequivocally English.
The term dates from at least the 18th century, when it
appeared in the London Evening News, May 1766, as the
title of a story they intended shortly to publish:
“The Swan and the Dickey-bird: A fable - shall be
inserted in our next”
At that time ‘dickey-bird’ was a generic nursery term for
the small, chirruping birds often found in the English
countryside and features in the well-known nursery
rhyme Two Little Dicky Birds. The rhyme is usually
accompanied by wiggling index-finger gestures, to
represent the birds:
Two little dicky birds,
Sitting on a wall;
One named Peter,
One named Paul.
The rhyme was adapted from the earlier ‘Two Little
Blackbirds’, which was first published in London in the
first book of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose’s Melody,
circa 1765:
There were two blackbirds
Sat upon a hill,
The one was nam’d Jack,
The other nam’d Gill.
The ‘not a dicky-bird’ phrase indirectly derives from
the tweeting sounds made by the birds. ‘Dicky-birds’
became established as a Cockney Rhyming Slang term
for ‘words’, in the mid 20th century. The first record of
it in print is in the 1932 ‘P. P.’ Rhyming Slang:
“ Word... Dicky bird.”
So, ‘not a dicky-bird’ means ‘not a word’, that is, silence,
especially in the context where a spoken or written word
might have been expected - for example, ‘Jack said he
would write, but I haven’t heard a dicky-bird from him
for weeks’.
Is there an English phrase or saying that
you would like to know more about?
Email it to us on [email protected]
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