On Avian Anatomy, Curious Notions Regarding.

I understand, fully, painfully understand, that we live, in these great United States, in a highly thick society. High school children cannot find their home states on maps; more people believe in a character from ancient Hebrew myth named Satan than believe in the scientific principle of evolution. I grade papers from college sophomores whose musings, with the unleashed war-dogs of MS Word at their editing disposal, nevertheless elevate Dick and Jane into canonical greatness by contrast. Dick and Jane at least had linear narrative and avoided the indefinite “you.” (From all the direct references to “you,” in their essays, it is clear that my students feel that they have an awful lot to teach me.) In general, America’s grasp on science, geography, and the written and spoken word of its most popular language, is abysmal.

However, there was a time, once, in the shrouded annals of history, or fifteen years ago, when the English language had mutually agreed upon monikers for parts of the animal anatomy. Appendages on bipedal and quadrupedal animals, used principally for support and propulsion on the body at large, were referred to as legs. Primates, having prehensile hands enabling their forelegs to grasp and manipulate objects, were said to have arms. But we didn’t stop there—heavens no. In response to bipedal mammals' confusion at the prospect of upright walking creatures with forelimbs employed for aerial propulsion, we came up with a third category of appendage that in English was once called a wing. A wing, you see, was a bit like an arm in that birds do not use them for support, but mostly not like an arm as birds practice all dexterous tasks using the beak and feet. The word seemed a happy compromise, describing this thing that was neither arm nor leg. It was a wing as soon as the bird had hatched, albeit a naked and useless one. It was a wing when it propelled its owner to lofty avian sabbaticals, and it was a wing when it flapped uselessly at the side of a chicken. It was even a wing when you shot the bird, cut it off, plucked it, cleaned it, and threw it in a deep fryer for seven minutes at 350 degrees.

That was all, of course, before the revolution in anatomical nomenclature ushered in by Buffalo Wild Wings and Domino’s Pizza came about, for the edification of the unversed masses. It began innocuously enough, but in retrospect bad things were afoot from the get-go. When one ordered a bucket of tiny chicken parts doused in barbecue sauce, someone came up with the clever idea of marketing them as “wings,” even though half of them, even to the untrained eye, were quite clearly legs, and hence not wings. I could perhaps sympathize with the pressing need to rename one animal part another, in order to clarify its eminent edibility, were it not already commonly known that chicken legs were, indeed, quite edible. In fact, food nomenclature had already bestowed them a name apart from biology’s: they were called drumsticks for their, well, drumstick-like shape, later cleverly truncated simply to drums. It isn't as if they were attempting to push fried gizzard here. They weren't bad names, and I do not recall any inchoate militancy protesting the unfairness of it at all. And yet, seemingly overnight, a small leg was now a wing, as if human infants were born with wings.

Yet the Movement for the Obfuscation and Revision of Our Nomenclature, as they came to be known, was far from through. Turning legs into wings was but the appetizer: it was not until the late 1990’s that their dark culinary think tank produced the piece de resistance, the oh-so-daftly entitled boneless wing. I hoped against reason that this was a joking reference to a strip from Gary Larson’s Far Side comic series of the 1980’s and 90’s, which pictured a barbed-wire enclosed field upon which flopped limp, invertebrate poultry. The caption read “boneless chicken ranch.” Alas, the world of delivery food had no such irony in mind. A boneless wing, you see, was a piece of flesh taken from the rib area of the bird, sliced into smaller pieces, breaded, deep fried, and served, even though the box these things come in is invariably marked "rib meat." And once again, there was already in circulation an extant and perfectly utile name for this part of the chicken called breast meat. It was not as if you might say to a restaurant clerk “I’d like some breast meat chicken,” and receive a look of confusion or offense. The term had place in the cultural narrative that was widely and mutually understood as well as value-neutral.

I am afraid of the larger implications of this rhetorical movement, on several grounds: will I soon order a porterhouse and be served a hamburger, and then have it explained that it’s a boneless porterhouse? Will flank steak and chuck suddenly start calling themselves filet mignon, hoping that no one will notice? And really, really, dire portends arrive for the prosthetics industry if humans start conversationally referring to our limbs interchangeably.

So today I launch the Take Back the Wing movement, boycotting and beginning a letter-writing campaign toward all restaurant chains that call things other than wings wings. In this fight, you are either with me, or you are with Domino’s. And did you really want to be stuck with Domino’s for the rest of your life? I even have a motto for my newfound social activism: Let's Call Wings Wings Here—‘Cuz, Really, Weren’t We Goddamn Stupid Enough Already?

Whaddyall think?