A kerfuffle over ruffled feathers
● Journalists are fond of the phrase “ruffles feathers” when reporting on people who cause trouble. Here are three headlines from articles published in the past 10 months:
“Helen Zille ruffles feathers with ANC and apartheid-era cadre deployment comparison”;
“Helen Zille ruffles feathers with ‘ubuntu is bogus’ claim”; and
“Helen Zille ruffles feathers with controversial remarks on gender and race identity”.
If SA had to appoint a secretary-general of feather-ruffling, or a feather-ruffler-in-chief, Zille would certainly be a leading candidate for the position. She ruffled more feathers on Friday, this time annoying the LGBTQIA+ community by telling they/them to “lose those wokus-pokus pronouns”.
There are others vying with Zille for the position of head feather-ruffler. Here are some other recent quotes:
“Ndlozi ruffles feathers again with his latest comment about Mandela’s legacy”;
“Moonchild ruffles feathers with comments about black security guards”;
“Somizi and Mohale’s private jet snap ruffles feathers”;
“Royal AM owner Shauwn Mkhize has certainly ruffled a few feathers with her antics on and off the pitch”; and
“Mamelodi Sundowns coach Pitso Mosimane says he is competitive, and if he ruffles feathers that is because he is from a background of having to hustle”.
Those are all from SA, but there are also dozens of recent reports using feather-ruffling with reference to leaders involved in the war in Eastern Europe.
There’s no denying that “ruffles feathers” is a handy phrase to describe someone who annoys, aggravates, irritates, irks, needles, pesters, angers, bothers, bugs, enrages, infuriates or disturbs you. Anyone who rubs you the wrong way, gets under your skin, gets on your nerves or drives you up the wall could be said to have ruffled your feathers.
But does this need to be the go-to expression for every person who does something to rattle other people?
It seems to me this feather-ruffling idiom has been applied to so many individuals, from those who mock gender-specific pronouns to those who invade other countries with missile launchers, that it has lost whatever force it once had.
Etymologists are in dispute about when the phrase first came into being. You could say they ruffle each other’s feathers while quarrelling about whether it has Scandinavian, German or Middle English roots.
The origins of the expression, on the surface, seem fairly simple — a bird does not like to have its feathers put into disarray — but there is even more argument about this. US ornithologist Herb Wilson says birds do not puff up their feathers when angry, they do it because they are cold.
“By raising the feathers, air is trapped and forms an insulating blanket. At the higher portions of the thermoneutral zone, the feathers are lowered to decrease their insulation to prevent overheating,” writes Wilson.
The best feather-ruffling story I found in this search came from the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in the UK, which during lockdown took in five African Grey parrots because their owners could not or would not keep them. The birds “became very bad influences on each other shortly after meeting ... it wasn’t long before they started swearing at one another”. This escalated into abuse of visitors, who complained about being called “fat tw*t” or being told to “f**k off” by the parrots. They have now been moved to a part of the park not accessible by the public, so that they won’t ruffle any more feathers.
Incidentally, the word “ruffle” also gave us the offshoot “kerfuffle”, meaning a row or a disturbance. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces this back to the 1930s, when it began to be used by Canadian immigrants of Scottish descent, who spelt it “curfuffle” and built it from a slang dialect word “fuffle” meaning “to throw into disorder”.
The point of all this, in case you’re wondering, is that cute words that bring to mind puffy, fluffy things (or cold little birds) are fine when it comes to describing sweary parrots, people who do things a bit differently or people who slightly irritate other people.
Ruffling and kerfuffling are woefully inadequate, however, when it comes to the loss of life, home and freedom. So let’s keep the feathers for vexatious tweeters and find a more weighty way to describe war.