Derogatory? Not quite, in US, there was once such a chicken called Mike

So, what exactly is a headless chicken, and how does it run around? When MPs brought proceedings in Parliament to a halt on Ambassador Ronen Sen8217;s use of the phrase, they may well have wondered.

So, what exactly is a headless chicken, and how does it run around? When MPs brought proceedings in Parliament to a halt on Ambassador Ronen Sen8217;s use of the phrase, they may well have wondered. Upon researching, they would find that the etymology is rather more difficult to grasp than physical representations.

Dictionaries are agreed that to do something like a headless chicken is to do it fast, without thought or analysis.

But the metaphor was mixed somewhat in I038;B Minister P R Dasmunsi8217;s defence of the media. 8220;Those who treat media as headless chickens,8221; he said today, 8220;their brains have become a vegetable.8221;

Do remember, a headless chicken still has a heart and possibly tranquility. The blogosphere has been abuzz this month with reported sightings of a headless chicken in China8217;s Yunan province. The accompanying photographs 8212; admittedly of uncertain provenance 8212; show, well, a chicken without a head loitering leisurely in the grass.

To know how to run like a headless chicken, they would have to travel to the American town of Fruita, Colorado population by the 2000 census: 6,478. We have it on the authority of Fodor8217;s that it took just one headless chicken to put Fruita on the tourist map. Every May the town hosts a festival with, among other things, a 8220;5K Run Like a Headless Chicken8221; race.

At the heart of the festival is the enormously popular mythmaking around a chicken that survived for two years after being beheaded in 1945. A local farmer, Lloyd Olsen, put a chicken called Mike on the chopping block so he could be cooked up by Clara, his wife. But Mike survived, and Olsen, seeing that the rooster was meant to live, fed him for the next 18 months with an eyedropper and took him on tours far and wide. And so was born the cult of Mike the Headless Chicken. It seems that sometimes a chicken8217;s head can be cut off while leaving the brain stem intact.

The use of the phrase 8220;like headless chicken8221;, however, probably comes from the blind panic induced in chicken immediately upon being beheaded by persons with a better target than Olsen. So when humans are said to be doing something like headless chicken, it means they do it fast and without thought. The point, clearly, is not that a chicken is headless 8212; but the precision with which it has been beheaded.