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my spouse is listening to an audio book and learned that in days of yore (not so long ago in the USofA), when women were responsible for carving up the bird, some colorful terms were bandied about; she would:
thrust a chicken*
spoil a hen
break a goose
pierce a plover
(I see a potential to devolve into a food thread here, so please proceed with caution.)
*uncle bill suggests this may have been truss a chicken. does anybody have the hardcopy of "America's Women" by Gail Collins?
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as long as it's not choking the chicken. that's something different altogether...
more likely by yourself...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carrying on, I'm afraid (told ya I'd get ya): this is an, um, interesting site, with some things funnier than others. Perhaps WW can enlighten us at least re: this:
BARBECUE: From the French term “barbe-a-queue”, meaning “from snout to tail”. The word was in use in Virginia before 1700. http://www.hungrymonster.com/humor/Jokes.cfm?jid=54Edit-- eta! 
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>more likely by yourself...
perforce, I am going to assume you actually meant "by oneself".
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>oneself
yeah, yeah. I'm always putting my propositions in the wrong place...
formerly known as etaoin...
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From the French term “barbe-a-queue”
How do ones pronounce that last word?
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I'm wondering about the barbe = head part. Doesn't make sense, but I don't know the etymology here.
On a plain folk level, sans dictionary, I wonder whether the barbe part could have been the tusks of a boar's head that could have been barbequed in Virginia at some point in my beloved state's history and very likely in the 17th century. We do have a positively splendid inn in Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson's territory, called the Boar's Head Inn.
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Dr. Bill says:
online etymology dictionary has:
barbecue
1657, from Amer.Sp. barbacoa, from Arawakan (Haiti) barbakoa "framework of sticks," the raised wooden structure the Indians used to either sleep on or cure meat. Originally "meal of roasted meat or fish," modern popular noun sense of "grill for cooking over an open fire" is 1931. He also suggests looking at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bar1.htm
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So, the site you posted toward the top, Jackie, is?
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Here's another site that mentions the head-to-tail for barbeque and on the site my question was answered: barbe in French = whisker http://www.foodreference.com/html/artbarbecue.htmlDuh! (Barber!) Anyway, from whisker to tail = barbeque Although MW and gang don't ascribe to the whisker/tail etymology, it is quite satisfying as an apparently widespread factoid.
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