bird

   This word had been associated with ‘girl’ since the fourteenth century. Originally it may have been a separate word, ‘burd’, a poetic word for woman, and there may have been confusion with ‘bride’, since ‘bird’ itself was often written as ‘brid’. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle ‘bird’ is equated with other seventeenth-century endearments, used by a man to a woman. ‘My bonny bird’ is used to a young girl in Sir Walter Scott’s Old Morality, and evidence of this being true nineteenth-century usage, rather than one of Scott’s archaisms, comes in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. A woman uses ‘my bird’ to address a younger woman, equating the term with ‘my precious’. It was at one time possible to refer to a young man as a bird, a usage which the Oxford English Dictionary considers to be long obsolete. Nevertheless, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe, which concerns life in the Nottingham region in the 1950s, a man says to another: ‘What’s up, Jack, my owd bird?’ A little later in the same novel the hero’s aunt says to him: ‘How are yer, my owd bird?’ D.H. Lawrence, another writer from the Nottingham area, has ‘old bird’ used in a friendly way between young men in Aaron’s Rod. A Salute to the Great McCarthy, by Barry Oakley, has a girl who addresses a young man as ‘my husky creature’. He replies: ‘You lovely bird. Peck me.’ In Gideon Planish, by Sinclair Lewis, a mother says to her daughter: ‘Now don’t interrupt, little mocking bird.’