David Brooks

They got a decent fee for him to be fair, obviously turned out he's worth a lot more now but it could of easily of gone the other way.
 
billythekid said:
You might be interested in this or you may already know.

  • As early as 1300, bird was used for ‘girl’, but this was probably owing to confusion with another similar middle English word, burde, which also meant ‘young woman’. The usage crops up from time to time in later centuries, clearly as an independent metaphorical application, but there does not really seem to be an unbroken chain of occurrences leading up to the sudden explosion in the use of bird for ‘young woman’ in the 20th century.
    (www.dictionarycentral.com)
https://english.stackexchange.com/q...-the-origin-of-breng-bird-meaning-young-woman
Click to expand...
That IS interesting. So if burde is Middle English then then does that come from the Anglo-Saxon? Which would make it older than "bird" for a ..... bird?
 
Bird is from the Old English 'brid.' This makes an Anglo-Saxon origin very likely. If I was at home I could look it up as I have the full OED.

Strange they don't stock the 26 volume version at WH Smith in Copenhagen Airport.

PS. Middle English is a giant leap from Old English.

To clarify, I am talking about bird as a feathery, flighty creature.
 
I have just checked the OED. Erik is quite right, the original form ‘brid’ (plural ‘briddas’) Is Old English, ie Anglo Saxon. That refers to the feathered creature that sings.

The OED says that in Northumbria and in some uses it only meant the young of feathered creatures eg a hen and her birds. The OED believes that this fed through to the revived use of ‘bird’ to mean young girl, as per this description from 1927: “used especially for a more flirtatious or less reputable type of girl”.

The use of “chick” to mean something similar is American, dating back to the nineteen twenties. Prior to that in Britain “chick” was used to mean a (much loved) child.
 
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