Today is the first day of the Chinese Year of the Rooster, 2017.
 
I am addressing this in particular to North American friends, since yesterday evening on TV we saw Michael Portillo on one of his great railway journeys, travelling through the state of Kansas.  In one of his enounters, a young Native American man, in full costume, performed a “prairie chicken” dance from the Blackfeet of Montana.
 
This dance represents the male of a species of Tympanuchus, more strictly a type of grouse, but generally referred to as the “prairie chicken”.  His dance was so impressive and bird-like: it is only the third time that I remember seeing such a convincingly bird-like dance.
 
Explaining it, he said the male gets “all cocky”, and it struck home how the etymology of that word is directly derived from the male bird.
 
However, this modern Chinese interpretation is, I would say, cute rather than “cocky”.  The song itself, though, is at least several decades old.