You Know What Poke Your Butt
Marking R. asks: Where did the whole kids matter of saying "Guess what?" and answering with "chicken butt!" come from?
The antiphon's origins are usually speculated to have come from a exercise common to street merchants when they would call out what they were offering and how much it toll. One particularly delicious item was advertised as:
Chicken butt! Five cents a cut!
Butt, in this sense didn't mean the back end of the bird, but, rather, its shoulder. A long time ago, butchers would pack less desirable cuts, similar shoulders, into barrels, either to store them or ship them. Barrels similar these had been called butts since the late 14th century, afterwards the Modernistic French word for a barrel or wineskin, botte and the Latin buttis (for cask). Over time, the term was applied to the cuts of meat inside the barrels besides.
It's difficult to verify when a chicken shoulder toll $0.05, although historical data on the price of a whole chicken is relatively easy to find. For instance, during the Roaring Twenties, hens were sold for betwixt $0.36 and $0.38 per pound (nearly $four.43 today), but at the superlative of the Keen Low, the toll of a hen had dropped to only $0.21 per pound (about $3 today).
One theory every bit to why the expression became so pop is tied to the 1930s. In 1935, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess debuted, and in information technology, Maria compares Sporting Life to a craven, invoking the merchants' dirge:
I hates yo' struttin' fashion,
Yeah sir, and yo' god d*mn empty-headed smile
an yo' ten cent di'mons an' yo' fi' cent butts. Oh, I hates yo' guts.
All that said, as far as I tin find, there is no documented evidence of anything to the effect of "What's upwardly?" or "Guess what?" (or whatsoever of the many variants) followed by "Craven Butt!" until Mississippian Charles Thousand. Bell'south 1962 novel The Married Land. In it, we find:
…just what as a boy he had spoken with boys, white and colored, when they ran and fought together ("What, what, chicken butt, come effectually the house and lick it up.)
Disregarding a rather interesting, though seemingly unrelated, 1970 work Psychoanalytic Study of the Kid – Volume 25 in which one Ruth South. Eissler describes a daughter named Naomi who uses some peculiar terms such as "chicken-butt" to mean "sex" and "cookie" to hateful "vagina" and is described every bit "confusingly using words that she senses are somehow inaccurate…", adjacent upwardly in the known documented instances of this phrase we have a rather telling case actualization in the 1973 book Blackness Linguistic communication by Malachi Andrews and Paul T. Owens. On page 73 it contains the following entry:
Chicken Butt- When someone calls out, "What?", because they didn't hear, a reply might be the rhyme, "Craven Barrel." It means forget it; I am not going to repeat it. Junior flip usage.
In that same year, information technology was noted in the National Education Association of the United States' Today's Education Volumes 62-64 that at least some children were using "craven butt" as a slang insult: "'Mrs. Pratt, come check me off.' If I paid no attention and helped somebody else, he might yell again, 'Mrs. Pratt!' If I yet paid no attention, he might mutter something about my being a 'chicken butt.'"
Following that upwardly, the next documented instance I could find of the full general phrase in question was in the 1983 piece of work The Black Nation. In Volumes three-five of that work, the following appears:
…craven cacciatore, chicken-alla-wendy, chicken — alla-rex ir poor folks eat chicken feet, chicken necks chicken gizzards, chickenstew (with no chicken) chicken backs SAY WHAT!? CHICKEN BUTT!!!!!!!!!!! don't you wish that all rich folks would plow into a plucked chicken & fly into a vat of hot grease & let united states of america poor folks swallow good for a while…
So, from the documented evidence (and quite a bit of somewhat less reliable personal anecdotes), it would seem as if, whether actually connected to any early on 20th century merchant slang or not, the phrase and its variants originated in southern black-American culture at least as early as the 1960s and probably a flake earlier. Notwithstanding, if the documented evidence is any indication, this phrase didn't grab on among a wider audience until sometime in the late 1970s and 1980s, at which signal it shortly became a somewhat ubiquitous expression among all American youth, forth with variants like "Approximate what?" and rhyming offshoots similar "Guess why? Chicken thigh!" and "Guess who? Chicken tattoo!"
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Bonus Facts:
- Several years ago, an undercover video surfaced showing egg hatchery workers glibly tossing infant chicks into a grinder alive. An accustomed industry practice called "instantaneous euthanasia," it accounts for the slaughter of 200,000,000 male chicks each twelvemonth (the males were culled because they couldn't produce eggs and supposedly would be prohibitively expensive to heighten as meat chickens). While acknowledging the state of affairs wasn't ideal, a spokesman for The United Egg Producers, Mitch Caput, noted, "There is, unfortunately, no way to brood eggs that only produce female person hens. If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, nosotros're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need." He also noted that, while seemingly brutal, the use of the grinder "is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks."
- However, things are looking up for male person chicks… kind of. Technology has advanced so that it is possible to notice the sex of a chick early on while it's all the same in the egg. Expected to be commercially viable within iv years, the egg producers industry group has recently appear that by 2020, they should be able to end the practice of grinding newborn baby chickens to death. Instead, they'll just sell the fertilized eggs every bit, well, eggs. So the question to you, dear readers, is this- is it better to exist somewhat consciously for an exceptionally brusk while only to have your fate be to become snuffed out in a grinder soon after emerging from your shell, or to never really exist at all on any conscious level?
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Source: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/07/know-chicken-butt/
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