chicken

   This can be used affectionately, to a girl, or insultingly, normally to a man. ‘How would you like that, chicken?’ is a mother addressing her daughter in Mariana, by Monica Dickens. There is a comparable use in Resolve This Day, by Geoffrey Bainbridge. The word is similar in many ways to ‘child’, and indeed had acquired that meaning by the fifteenth century. This is still acknowledged in modern times when we say that such and such a person is ‘no chicken’, meaning that he or she is no longer young. When ‘chicken’ is used vocatively in Iris Murdoch’s The Word Child as an endearment, one wonders whether the novelist was led to it by her general train of thought. A couple are talking about their future together, and the woman has said that she has always wanted to live in the country. ‘There, my chicken, there, my little one,’ says the man. ‘We’ll live in the country, in a country cottage,’ says the woman, and adds: ‘and we could have animals, couldn’t we, some chickens and a dog.’ War Brides, by Lois Battle, has a young American husband saying to his wife: ‘Okay, chicken, let’s see if you remember how to cut a rug.’ To accuse someone of being a chicken is to say that he is a coward, chicken-hearted. Shakespeare refers to people as ‘chickens’ in this sense, though he does not use the word vocatively. It occurs in The Dream Team, by Joe McGinnis. A woman and a man are taking a shower together. The woman turns on the cold water instead of the hot, causing the man to leap out. ‘“Chicken!” she said, and made a face. If she had been holding a towel, I believe she would have snapped it at me.’