Pigeon vs. pidgin

I think you know you're pretty close to rock bottom productivity when you start thinking seriously about pigeons. I don't imagine this is something that really successful people wake up and do. I've had one of those days though and have found myself thinking about pigeons on three separate occassions (including this one).

The first was while I was at a duck pond. There's always a lot of pigeons hanging around on the fringes. My thought was, why do they look so shit? And why don't they fuck off and leave the zen calm of the duck's unsullied by their grim reminder of the reality of urban life? Instead, they were trooping around after crumbs like a day out from a world war one field hospital: fost-bite crippled feet, wings mangled in some horrid accident, eye's blanched by disease.

The second time I thought about pigeons was while trying to think up a children's story. The best I could come up with was a story called Percy the Polite Pigeon. It is a touching tale, about a pigeon that always queues patiently behind the others for food, gives up his space under sheltering eaves to lady pigeons, walks away into bushes whenever he wants to do a poo. He gets eaten by a fox in one of his trips to the toilet, too hungry and exhausted to fly away.

So I thought in honour of a day misspent today's post will be about pigeon vs. pidgin English. Whenever I used to hear someone talking about pidgin English I always assumed it was spelt pigeon and had somehow derived from the birds. Maybe it had something to do with inner city slang. In fact, pidgin's etymology is unclear, although it probably comes from a mimicking of how the Chinese would pronounce the English word business in the nineteenth century. Pidgin means a language that is formed when two separate languages meet, being a mixture of the two. Pigeon comes ultimately from the pipere, to chirp. Poor pigeons, even their homophones are more interesting than them.

If pigeon English did exist then it would presumably be the language that came from humans attempts to communicate with pigeons. When we look for examples of this, we can see that the mad bird lady in Mary Poppins may in fact have been the first person to try to master this language. She's definitely decided (and in my view rightly) that the underlying grammatical strucutre of pigeon English is quite literally, crumby. Any communication with these flying rats is going to have to be heavily bread based, probably every second word will need to be a crumb just to keep the pigeons interested in the conversation. 'Cooo coo' might be important too, but I'm not sure. It might be a little patronising to the pigeons who don't really make that sound at all.

No doubt there's plenty more human lunatics who would be happy to try to strike up small talk with pigeons. But pigeon English will only take off once the pigeons are willing to meet us half way. That, after all, is what a pidgin language must be. I will be keeping an eye out for this from now on. If you would like to do the same then I believe that the early signs and signifiers to look for will be a pigeon standing squarely in the middle of the pavement alternately pecking the ground, waving a wing at you in imitation of the human 'hello' sign, and then saying 'Coooo coo' in an ironic voice.