In his 1918 Game Birds of California, Joseph Grinnell writes that the American Avocet and the Black-necked Stilt are each “sometimes known as the ‘lawyer bird’ because of its long bill….”
That’s way too funny to be original, but I had no idea how venerable the pun was until I happened across this glancing reference to the joke: the stilt is known under a variety of “popular names,” including Lawyer:
The origin of this last popular name (which is most in use), I have not been able to discover: there appears to be nothing unusual in the length of its bill.
So writes James E. De Kay in 1844, in the Natural History of New-York. Even then, to judge by the way that he merely alludes to it in the negative, the witticism was not new.
How far back can we move this? Surely its origins are oral, anonymous, and irrecoverable, but I’d be surprised to find that De Kay was the first to quote it. Ideas?
