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Middlemarch vocabulary
6 birds and/or bird terms
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popinjay
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tags: [avian]
► definition
Definition:1. a parrot2. a shooting target mounted on a pole3. a conceited motormouth
photo: By L.Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5635030recording: parrot imitating a dog: by jmagiera, licensed under the Attribution License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ https://freesound.org/people/jmagiera/sounds/321170/
► uses
Uses:
Now let us turn again to January,
That in the garden with his faire May
Singeth well merrier than the popinjay
Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales: The Merchant's Tale
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our men tied live cats to the ends of their pikes, and put them over the wall and cried with the cats, “Miaut, Miaut.” Truly the Imperials were much enraged, having been so long making a breach, at great loss, which was eighty paces wide, that fifty men of their front rank should enter in, only to find a rampart stronger than the wall. They threw themselves upon the poor cats, and shot them with arquebuses as men shoot at the popinjay.
Ambroise Paré. Journeys In Diverse Places
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“That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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But what mainly occasioned a righteous indignation was, that the scoundrelly popinjay, while he cut a fandango here, and a whirligig there, did not seem to have the remotest idea in the world of such a thing as keeping time in his steps.
Edgar Allan Poe. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4: The Devil in the Belfry (1839)
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