“As sick as a parrot” is a mystifying phrase

09 October 2016 - 02:00 By Sue de Groot

It has been a good week for the African Grey Parrot, or at least for those of them that are left in the wild. Now that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has banned the buying and selling of this chatty bird, those who would keep parrots will have to learn to use the voice memo function on their smartphones.Come to think of it, they could just strap said phone into a little holster on their shoulders and never know the difference.I used to think the phrase "as sick as a parrot" came from AGPs and other poor birds shut up in cages far from their jungular homes and forced to endure cracks about crackers, but there seems to be as much argument about this expression as there was at the CITES meetings.story_article_left1The usually loquacious Phrase Finder remains stubbornly silent on the subject of sick parrots. So does the Online Etymology Dictionary. All I could find was a lively discussion on the Guardian's "Notes & Queries" forum, in a dirty corner labelled "Semantic Enigmas".All the theories about the origin of "as sick as a parrot" sounded plausible, but there were two in particular that caught my fancy.The first came from a correspondent calling himself (or herself) FL O'Toole (which sounds suspiciously like a pseudonym, if you ask me), who wrote: "To avoid United States quarantine and livestock importing restrictions, people smuggling parrots from South America into the US dope the birds on tequila as they near the Mexican border."Careful timing of the binge will ensure that the birds are sleeping it off through the border-crossing formalities and will not greet the officials with a mouthful of verbals as is the breed's wont. Having thus avoided detection, the downside for the exotic loudmouths is coming to with the mother and father of a hangover. This queasiness manifests itself in the origin of the expression."It is, you must admit, a beguiling explanation. The only one that matched it came from someone called simply "John" (his real name, obviously), who offered this: "In 1909, the Tottenham Hotspur team toured Uruguay and Paraguay. On the voyage back home they were gifted the ship's parrot by the captain of the vessel. The parrot lived happily at the club for 11 years until it keeled over and died in 1919 on the very day Spurs were relegated from Division 1 and Arsenal promoted in their place."Since there seems to be no definitive consensus on the subject, I leave it to readers to choose the one they like best.story_article_right2There is a third possibility, which might please the more pedantic among us. This was submitted by one Dr FWA Johnson, and reads as follows: "The phrase originates from 1926 when the previously obscure disease of bird psittacosis became a pandemic of clinical importance, involving humans in 12 countries with more than 800 cases. The association of respiratory infections in man and contact with parrots was soon recognised."I looked up "psittacosis" to check that Dr Johnson had not made it up, and found an infectious disease also known as "parrot fever".And here I thought parrot fever was what infected those mugs who collect live feathered creatures for the purposes of having their own words repeated to them."Psittacosis" comes from the Latin psittacus, which means parrot. This also gave us "psittacism", which means "mere parroting" or "repetition without reason".Psittacism is perhaps what we do when using the baseless phrase "as sick as a parrot".I propose we nurture endangered birds by leaving them well alone in their natural habitats, and let us nurture endangered words by bringing them back into common use...

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