Polly want a cracker?
From robin redbreast to tomtit and jenny wren, we’ve long incorporated Christian nicknames into the common non-latin names of birds, as Matthew Dennison observes
We have long translated birds’ personalities into their names, says Matthew Dennison
TOO much seized with vanity and self-conceit’, the soldier-poet John Cutts was the object of Jonathan Swift’s trenchancy in his satirical The Description of a Salamander, published in 1705. Swift pilloried Lord Cutts as a ‘reptile of the serpent kind, with gaudy coat and shining train’. He explained to his readers that heroes were often likened to exotic animals and named after them ‘the Lion, Eagle, Fox and Boar’. He explained that the process worked in reverse, too: ‘Pies and daws are often styled with Christian nicknames, like a child.’
The ‘pies’ and ‘daws’ in question were magpies and jackdaws. The incorporation within their common, non-latin names of ‘Christian nicknames’ is surprisingly widespread among British birds—robin redbreast, tomtit, jenny wren: a venerable
tradition many centuries old. In a preindustrial, still rural society, close to its natural surrounds and its animal neighbours, investing bird species with our own names implied familiarity and, in many cases, affection. It revealed, too, something of the way in which different birds were regarded, as well as folk beliefs and the prevailing stereotypes upheld by past generations.
In 1835, in A Familiar History of Birds: Their Nature, Habits, and Instincts, clergyman Edward Stanley described the jackdaw as an ‘active, bustling, cheerful, noisy fellow... ever satisfied—always happy’ —and appropriately called Jack, as the name was traditionally associated with ‘male’ qualities of boldness and dash. Fellow Jacks include the lad who, climbing the beanstalk, repeatedly worsted the giant; that quick and nimble Jack who jumped over the candlestick, earning himself lasting good fortune; or Shakespeare’s dismissal of masculine irresponsibility in The Taming of the Shrew, ‘a mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack’.
Elizabethan classicist Philemon Holland pointed to another, equally audacious characteristic, describing jackdaws as ‘the
The magpie shares the jackdaw’s propensity for brash inquisitiveness
verriest theeves... especially for silver and gold’. Less pejoratively, the name Jack was associated with smallness or youth, with suggestions of liveliness. In the face of such evidence, there is a degree of bathos in the alternative explanation that the jackdaw’s name derives from its call: tchack, tchack.
The magpie shares the jackdaw’s propensity for brash inquisitiveness and noisy chatter. In the jackdaw’s case, the jack prefix suggests that such traits, albeit less than admirable, have a roguish charm. Not so the magpie. ‘Pies’ are pied birds, black and white in their colouring, a description in use in Anglo-saxon England as ‘pyge’. The ‘mag’ prefix is an abbreviated form of Margaret or Margery or the related ‘Maggot’. Either the countrymen of late-medieval England associated gossiping and a certain kind of nosy acquisitiveness with their womenfolk, or the name was chosen simply for its widespread currency: Margaret was a popular name and, then as now, magpies existed in large numbers. A similar explanation applies to the many avian ‘Bessies’: Bessie Bunting and Bessie Blakeling for the yellow bunting, Bessie Blackcap for the reed bunting and Bessie Brantail for the redstart. Some human bird names have all but disappeared. Once, the laughing call of the green woodpecker earned it the charmingly onomatopoeic common name of yaffle, with a long list of regional variants. Unlike the maleness of the jackdaw or the magpie’s feminine busybodyishness, the woodpecker’s laughter inspired no particular gender association. It was ‘laughing Betsy’ in Gloucestershire and ‘Jack Eikle’ in Worcestershire, although, today, both names are rare. In his Birds of Berwickshire, with Remarks on Their Local Distribution, Migration and Habits, and Also on the Folklore, Proverbs, Popular Rhymes and Sayings Connected with them, published in 1889, George Muirhead identified the local Borders name for the wren as Kitty wren. Elsewhere, and more commonly, jenny wren holds sway, a departure from historical precedent that traditionally regarded the fiercely territorial wren as male—the king of the birds in a wellknown fable by Aesop.
A number of the wren’s nicknames have been explained as being inspired by the bird’s tiny size. Anywhere that cotton was woven or wool spun, however, it was the characteristic whirring sound, a feature of the wren’s song, that inspired its human moniker, a sound like a spinning wheel or, indeed, the spinning jenny, invented in Lancashire in the third quarter of the 18th century. Less innocently, the polygamy of male wrens has provided grounds for an association with sexual licence. ‘Kitty’ in ‘kitty wren’ points
Originally, the birds were called titmouse
to a young woman of loose morals, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and the ‘pug’ of ‘Dicky pug’, once a Cheshire name for the bird, is slang for mistress or prostitute.
Long before the opening decades of the Industrial Revolution emerged the popular name for the bluetit—tomtit—that persists today. Originally, the birds were called titmouse, a compound of early Norse ‘tit’ (a small object or creature) and ‘mose’ or ‘mase’, a small bird. Etymologists have traced the name titmouse to medieval times, with the alliterative Tom titmouse current by the 17th century. An alternative
name of Billy biter arose from the bird’s habit of pecking the fingers of intruders when sitting on its eggs, although Harry Kirke Swann, in his Dictionary of English and Folk Names of British Birds of 1913, recorded an alternative interpretation of Billy biter as a corruption of willow biter. Swann also offered a female name for the bluetit: the Betty tit.
Best known of all Christian nicknames for birds is, of course, robin, a contraction of Robin redbreast. The breed has sometimes been known simply as the redbreast, for obvious reasons, and is listed as such in Christopher Merrett’s influential British fauna of 1667, Pinax rerum naturalium
britannicarum. Ornithologist David Lack claimed it was the bird’s ‘friendly familiarity’ that inspired the ‘robin’ prefix, originally an anglicisation of the French name Robin, a diminutive form of Robert appropriate to the bird’s small size.
The child-like names noted by Swift 300 years ago as frequently applied to British birdlife express a fond relationship between man and bird that, for many, continues today. As with the disappearance from the popular lexicon of the common names of wildflowers, their gradual abandonment is cause for regret. After all, the Big Mavis may be a surprising East Lothian name for the mistle thrush, but it packs a punch rivalled only by the bird’s Latin name: Turdus viscivorus.