According to Sydney Smith, a churchman of two centuries ago “If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world it is a roast pheasant with bread sauce.”
A century after that Scottish politician Tom Johnston, when lamenting that poor people had been displaced from
show more...
lands by rich landowners, said “the peasant has been ruthlessly swept aside to make room for the pheasant.”
Both of these quotations are consistent with the current entry in Wikipedia for pheasant which says in part “Uses of pheasants: Pheasants are shot for sport and for the table…”
The Wikipedia article also says they are valued for their attractive appearance and I guess that is exemplified in the peacock which is a type of pheasant.
Pheasants are the birds being shot in those quaint rural images that remind you of Norman Rockwell and LL Bean.
People must have been admiring their plumage as well as their taste for a long time because the word pheasant spans millennia as well as language; as is often characteristic of a word that is widely used and understood.
The first use of pheasant in English so far as we know dates from 1299. Which is appropriate for a word that we think comes from French after the Norman Conquest.
Since a pheasant is a type of fowl I found it fitting that the first Oxford English Dictionary citation for pheasant is credited to a man named Fowler who did the digging back through the Middle English Records of the Abbey of Durham to turn up this first documented use.
French got pheasant from Latin who in turn got it from Greek and the reason the Greeks called this bird phasianos was that they had heard that these types of birds came from near the River Phasis which flows into the black sea.
show less...
