| 词源 |
children and chicken must always be pickin’. Both are al- ways hungry and ready to eat, testing everything for food. The saying, first recorded in 1682 as an old proverb, uses chicken as a plural, one of the few cases in English where this still occurs. William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913) included this wise obser- vation in his English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases Collected From the Most Authentic Sources (1882). Hazlitt was the grand- son of the more famous William Hazlitt (1778–1830), said to be the first English writer to make a living as a critic. |