What we casually refer to as Thanksgiving should properly be called You’re on Indian Land Day; but who wants to put up with drunken relatives, tryptophan poisoning, holiday traffic, shitty football, and severe gastric distress to celebrate a land grab that doesn’t merit celebrating? Let’s talk about wishbones instead. Their story is less freighted.
There’s a wishbone offense in football, a Wishbone salad dressing, a 1990s Wishbone television series, Wish Bone the rapper, a Wishbone app that “lets you compare and vote on tons of cool stuff,” the wishbone position in sex, the Wishbone Bus in some computers, and the most famous wishbone of all . . .
. . . the forked chest bone found in any bird, situated between the neck and chest. Its odd shape results from the fusion of the bird’s two clavicles, commonly known as collarbones, at the base of its sternum.
The wishbone is also called the furcula, which means “little fork” in Latin. It expands and contracts according to the movement of a bird’s thorax. Until the mid-1800s, the street name for furcula was merrythought, which had sexual connotations in English. It was then changed to the more family-friendly wishbone, although its communicants still probably wished for the same thing after the name change.
The tradition of breaking the wishbone did not originate in the United States. An ancient Italian civilization called the Etruscans preserved the furcula of chickens because they (the Etruscans) believed that birds possessed divine powers and that rubbing a wishbone was a way of sharing in those powers.
The Romans adopted this custom, but when their factory farms couldn’t produce sufficient wishbones to satisfy all the people who wanted to stroke them for luck, the Romans came up with the idea of breaking chicken wishbones in two, granting the person with the larger portion his wish, feeding the other person to the lions.
© The fine fucking print: The editorial content on this page is fictional. It is presented for satirical and/or entertainment purposes only. We cannot be held responsible for the actions of anyone who takes this sort of shit seriously. We also do not wish to be held responsible for any copyrighted material that sneaked onto this page when we weren’t looking. If you can prove that anything on this page belongs rightfully to you, we will happily take it down and return the unused portion. No questions asked.
