A silly joke about a parrot made the rounds of 19th-century American newspapers and may be the source for our expression “cry uncle,” meaning “to give up.” The anecdote features a boastful owner who orders a pet parrot to speak the word “uncle” but the bird refuses. The angry owner locks the animal inside a chicken coop and when the owner returns later, he discovers a massacre—the parrot killed all the hens except one. The parrot stands over the sole survivor and yells the exact same command at the hen to force a surrender: “Say uncle!”This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Crying Uncle”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello there, this is William Quinn from Abilene, Texas.
Hey, William.
Hi, how you doing?
Doing great, how about y’all?
All right, welcome to the show.
What’s on your mind?
What’s up?
Well, I heard a program here a few weeks back about y’all had been discussing aunt and auntie as an endearing term for whether it is your aunt or not, and it got me to thinking about calling and mentioning that uncle was kind of the same thing.
I remember as a child we had different people in our family. We actually had uncles and we had friends of my mom or dad, and they would introduce us later as an enduring term for uncle.
The other term that I was going to ask about is using uncle as a form of saying, and I give, or cry uncle, say uncle.
Yeah, there’s a joke behind that, William.
Our friends at the Dictionary of American Regional English have turned up a joke that was widely circulated in newspapers in the late 1800s that may have the origin of cry uncle, which is an Americanism.
So the short version is, there’s a fellow who’s boasting that his parrot could repeat anything that you told him. So he would tell the parrot to say this word and he’d tell the parrot to say that word.
But finally he said, just say the word uncle. And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it.
And he said, say uncle. And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it.
And he’s like shouting at the parrot, uncle, uncle, uncle, say uncle, just to get him to say any word at all.
And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it. And so he’s just done with the bird.
And he shuts it in the chicken coop with the chickens. And he comes out later.
And the parrot has killed all of the hens except for the last one. And the parrot is standing over the last hen saying,
Uncle, say uncle, you bugger, say uncle.
That’s pretty cool.
So the parrot was doing it.
So the bird’s what the man was doing to the parrot.
And so this joke apparently caught everybody’s fancy and was widely, I mean, it just appears so many times in all these different newspapers.
And we believe, we being people who study these sorts of things, that that is the origin of cryocole in the United States.
Wow.
Crazy, right?
That makes a little sense, but being back in the 1800s, I figured it would be newer than that.
I wanted to ask you, given that you’re calling from Texas, if you have ever heard something similar, it has the same meaning, but to holler calf rope when you want to give up.
He hollered calf rope when I wouldn’t let him up off the ground.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, I have heard that.
-huh.
Not near as many times as the term uncle.
I mean, actually, the first time in my memory was when I was 12 in a little schoolyard fight.
The guy that was on top of me said, oh, you ate dirt.
Well, thank you so much for your call.
Really appreciate it.
Well, I appreciate y’all.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, William.
Take care now.
Well, have a good one.
You too.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye.
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This explanation, of all you have ever given, seems the most contrived. Why was being used as the word for the parrot? This seems more like a joke based on an existing expression — which brings me to the theory I accept…
In “How The Irish Invented Slang,” by Daniel Cassidy, he claims that the Gaelic word for mercy is “anacal” (loosely pronounced ahna-kaal). The influx of Irish immigrants is what brought this saying to America, as well as a book of other expressions. Most of these expressions were not written in literature, so it’s easy for their origins to be lost
Just to get it on the record here, Daniel Cassidy’s book is terrible and not to be trusted, and his supposed etymology of “cry uncle” is a bad one. Here’s my takedown of his awful book: https://grantbarrett.com/humdinger-of-a-bad-irish-scholar/