Mostly clear. Low around 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Mostly clear. Low around 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Well, I’d bet the henhouse that it wasn’t to get one of the new diapers I read about in an old AARP bulletin.

The chicken diaper was invented for people who keep pet chickens indoors or, slightly more practical, transport them to poultry shows. Several online businesses — with such names as Pampered Poultry and Hen Holster, make the washable cloth diapers.

What is there to laugh out loud about — cackle, even — in this little news bulletin?

Well, first, that it was in the AARP bulletin — maybe the only news outlet where its readers know for sure what a chicken is. The vast majority of Twitters, Facebookers and other social media-ites would only be able to identify the word “chicken” if it had “Kentucky Fried” or “Popeye’s” or Church’s preceding it.

Second — that anyone would want a chicken for a house pet is fundamentally funny.

Third — There was an illustration of a brown chicken with what looked like a pair of pink training pants for toddlers that had been crossed with a woman’s purse hanging by the handle across the chicken’s tail. Anyone who has ever watched a chicken walk around would marvel that such a contraption would stay on more than 20 seconds. Chickens are spastic busybodies. They walk a step here, a step there, darting backwards, forwards, sideways, every so often spreading their wings and shaking themselves all over, all the time clucking anxiously, watching nervously out of their beady little eyes, then flapping their wings excitedly and breaking into a fast waddle when alarmed.

Third, if you have ever walked through a chicken yard, the word, “Chicken S-Blank Blank-T,” used interchangeably as both a noun and an adjective, takes on a more down-to-earth meaning. I can’t imagine how a chicken diaper, even if it worked, could not end up flinging “chicken-S- blank- blank- T” everywhere.

“Chicken-S-blank-blank-T” is a word every country kid grows up with. My husband’s family loved to tell the story of when the youngest child was maybe 4 or 5, his favorite insult was to call someone a “chicken S-blank-blank-T idjit.” “Idjit” is southern for “idiot” — a “chicken-S-Blank-Blank-T -Idiot.” Because he was the youngest of five, the rest of the family thought it was funny and tolerated it — until that’s what he called a pompous uncle making a Sunday afternoon visit.

That’s the phrase that still pops into my mind today whenever I’m around someone pompous. “Chicken S-blank-blank-T Idjit” I silently label him.

The chickens on their farm ran free over the yard until they were shooed into the henhouse at night. If you’ve ever used the saying, “like a chicken with its head cut off,” without thinking about it, you should have seen my mother-in-law at work. She could catch a chicken, wring its neck, dip it in scalding water, pluck off the feathers, clean it, cut it up, flour it, drop it in a skillet of hot grease and have on the table in 30 minutes fried chicken that Col. Sanders would have died for.

The idea of diapering a chicken would have made her throw her apron over her head and laugh till she cried.

I’ve got aprons she made me. I can do that too.

Mary McClure lives in Lawton and writes a weekly column for The Lawton Constitution.

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