the.com/spring chicken
The thing you insist you still are, right before your knees disagree.
means A young, inexperienced person — almost always used in the negative, to admit (or accuse someone of) no longer being young.
from Comes from 18th-century poultry markets, where 'spring chickens' were young birds hatched in spring and sold tender and fresh, fetching a better price than the tough old hens left over from winter. By the 1900s, 'no spring chicken' had hopped from the coop into everyday speech, applied to anyone past their tender prime — the bird's freshness becoming a yardstick for human youth.
- origin
- 18th-century term for a young tender hen
- usage shift
- by 1900s used almost always as a negation
- irony
- only ever said about people clearly not young