Saturday, March 3, 2012

Hickety, Pickety, My Black Hen


This is Alice the Australorp, photographed the other day in the chicken run in my backyard. The photo doesn’t capture the beautiful iridescence of her plumage nor her entirely satisfactory plumpness, and it’s not as sharp as it might be: do you have any idea how hard it is to photograph chickens? But it’s still quite nice.

Alice is attending to a piece of Golden Delicious apple, one of several I scrunched up for her and the others. Apples are in season at the moment, and the gnarled old tree next to the chicken run is chucking its fruit all over the furthest-back part of the lawn. (Backyard birds of other kinds are having a field day with those apples, and I don’t see why my chooks shouldn’t get a share.)

This fine figure of a chicken is one of a flock of six. You’ll meet the others presently.


A Rhyme Misremembered?
The title of this post comes from a nursery rhyme, which initially I recalled as ‘Higgledy-piggledy, My Black Hen’. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes set me right with ‘Hickety, Pickety...’, whose first known publication date is 1853.

Hand-me-down rhymes with a communal history have many variations, and
mine may be one from long ago, but “Higgledy-piggledy” seems unusual here because this sixteenth-century word for “a haphazard arrangement” (my definition — I like its contrary nature) probably first described the herding together of pigs, according to other Oxford sources. Back then, chickens didn’t come into it.

Alice the Australorp isn’t like the black hen of the rhyme. She doesn’t lay eggs specifically “for gentlemen”: they don
’t appear in her pecking order. Also, it would be a rare hen that could lay “sometimes nine and sometimes ten” eggs in a day, anyway.

8 comments:

  1. I learned this rhyme as "heckety peckety" - with the internal "e" sound matching the vowel in hen (and the second word echoing a chicken's pecking movements). Alice looks like a fine fat hen!

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  2. Ah: an Albertan variation! That 'e' sound makes a lot of poetic sense to me.

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  3. In Norwegian, hyggelig (pronounced higgely) means pleasant. I still find it difficult to say 'Nice to meet you' (Hyggelig å møte deg) without an overwhelming urge to 'Mother Goose' it.

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    1. Goldie, I don’t think the Norwegian powers that be are going to be impressed if I send you something as hazardous as a feather by mail - the risk of bird flu, bio-terrorism, etc. But I love your comment! (And thank you for becoming a follower.)

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  4. Yes, for me too it was "heckety peckety". It is much more secure with the pecking connotation & the rhyme with hen I feel.
    Nursery rhymes are fascinationg in their many adaptations over the years aren't they.
    Claire it could be 9 or 10 gentlemen & indeed over a much longer period of time. Lindsay

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    1. Thanks, Lindsay. Makes me wonder how the Australians say it: heckety peckety or heekety peekety?

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  5. Have tried twice to enter a (nice) comment and am not having much success-
    is it because I am a Mac user?

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    1. Oh, Keri H: I hope not! I too am a Mac user, some of the time anyway. You've made it, now, but I'd like to sort this out so feel free to drop me a line: claire[dot]gummer[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz

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