NEXT TIME YOU get your feathers ruffled about where you stand in some pecking order, keep in mind that while you may have spent thousands in therapy on this topic, and others have racked in untold millions writing and selling books that define your prescribed sorry circumstances to you, remember that the guy who authored the idea of who pecks who, when, where, and why, was talking about nothing more than, yup, chickens.
But before you stop payment on that most recent $150 check to your shrink, read on. It will make you feel better.
It was Norwegian zoologist-psychologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who, when studying how hens socially organized themselves, found himself needing to say it with words, and lacking the compound phrases to describe what he’d witnessed came up with what translates into “peck order.” On this side of the pond, University of Chicago zoologist W.C. Allee explained it all to us, transposing the whole thing in a rather off-handed comment he made about “women’s clubs, faculty groups, family groups or churches.”
According to William Safire’s marvelous book, Safire’s Political Dictionary, from there it was a skip and a leap from Aldous Huxley to Margaret Mead to W.H. Auden to me and you using the phrase in a popular culture kind of way to prescribe just who gets the shiny red bicycle under the tree, who gets the banged-up wheels in the garage, and who goes to therapy first.
Ah, chickens. How they come home to roost.
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