As sick as a parrot

Posted by ESC on December 04, 2000

In Reply to: As sick as a parrot? posted by ESC on December 03, 2000

: : Does anyone know the origin of this cliché?

: I can't help on this one. All I found was "sick as a cat" (compared to the U.S. "sick as a dog") in British English: A to Zed by Norman W. Schur (Harper Perennial, New York, 1987). Sick as cats and dogs probably refers to them yacking up with regularity. "Sick as a parrot" sounds like a Monty Python thing, but everything British sounds like Monty Python to me. Maybe having a pet parrot brought from a foreign place was a craze at one point and the transplanted parrots tended to die.

: Now that we're on the subject of "sick as," here's a phrase along those lines: "sicker than a fat dog." I heard that on an old movie, "Ride the High Country." Another from that movie, "kick the bitter hell out of me."

SICK AS A PARROT - ".extremely chagrined. 1979 - 'The Maggatollah admitted frankly that he was 'sick as a parrot' at the way events had been unfolding.'." The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang by John Ayto and John Simpson (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1996).