pettichaps

[prettygoodword]

Theme week! Birds whose names sound like insults. Yes, there's more than enough of those for a couple theme weeks, though I'm only doing the five best:


pettichaps or pettychaps (PET-ee-chaps) - n., any of several small-billed European warblers, including willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus), garden warbler (Sylvia borin), stern Orphean warbler (Sylvia hortensis), and the chiffchaffs (Phylloscopus spp.).



Thanks, WikiMedia!

That's the pettichaps that's also known as a willow warbler -- though all of the pettichaps (yes, the plural is the same as the singular) also have other names, which is probably just as well. The name does not, despite what it might look, mean "small pants," but rather incorporates chap(s) in the obsolete sense of jaw -- so "small mouth."

---L.

Comments

[falkner]

I'm quietly adding to my vocabulary "pettychap" to use as an insult in the confines of my mind :D

[prettygoodword]

I am all in favor of this usage. Either silent or out loud.

[full_metal_ox]

Not my monkeys and not my circus, but I could also imagine it as a flippant rendering of 小人 (xiăorén), the term used for the Inferior Man or Petty Person in the I Ching (as contrasted to 君子 (jūnzǐ), the Great Man or Superior Person.)

(Although here’s an interpretation of the jūnzǐ by Alice Sparkly Kat; one of the relentless themes of their essays is that this stuff is a lot more complicated than any crunchy bite-sized Anglo-diasporic interpretation [another being that the Sinosphere is not a monolith]: https://www.alicesparklykat.com/articles/491/The_OP_of_the_I_Ching/)

[prettygoodword]

I’ve done basically nothing with the Yi Jing in the original, but I’ve poked at both Dao De Jing and the Analects, and in both the language and the concepts are far from simple.