Friday, January 4, 2019

2019 - Day 4/361 - Friday...Foment...

As long as we are on the subject of chickens and all things eggy and feathery, I thought I would show you this photo of one of our broody girls. Brooding hens (this is my interpretation, not Mrs. Google or Mr. Wikipedia) are hens that THINK they are going to sit on their nest until they hatch an egg, even if there is NO egg to be hatched. If you remember back in your high school biology class (or maybe in your health class during PE), you will recall that it takes two to tango...well, the same goes with chickens. And in this case, there is no party of the second part in the hen house. There is plenty of co-habitation, but no copulation. There are no buns in the ovens, and it is not really a possibility. SO, on occasion, one or more of the hens will just sit there and wait. And wait. And wait some more, until they finally get the message that nothing is going to happen, and they give up. At some point during the day, we assume they venture out and eat a bug here and there, and get some water, but they are pretty steadily on the nests.

Foment - Verb: to promote the growth or development of: rouse, incite. The activist group insists that the weekend-long protest was intended to foment debate, not violence.

Did You Know? If you had sore muscles in the 1600s, your doctor might have advised you to foment the injury, perhaps with heated lotions or warm wax. Does this sound like an odd prescription? Not if you know that foment traces to the Latin verb fovere, which means "to heat." The earliest documented English uses of foment appear in medical texts offering advice on how to soothe various aches and pains by the application of moist heat. Wink, wink, wink... But the idea of applying heat can also be a metaphor for stimulating or rousing to actions, and soon after its debut, foment was also being used in political contexts to mean "to stir up," "to call to action," or, in a sense at least figuratively opposite to its original one, "to irritate."

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