It’s never too late to bill and coo
The modern artists of today
May paint their picture faster
But when it comes to skill, I say
You can’t beat an old master.
It’s never too late to bill and coo,
At any age one and one make two
And it’s never too late to fall in…
Never too late to fall in…
Never too late to fall in…
Love
(c) Sandy Wilson
“It’s never too late to bill and coo,” sings Lord Brockhurst in The Boy Friend, that affectionate 1950s tribute to an earlier tradition of musicals.
Of late, I’ve been looking at bird images and metaphors, of which there are well over a hundred in current English, between idioms (a chicken and egg problem), proverbs (what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the Durham chief constable said only the other day) and metaphorical applications of bird-related vocabulary (to crow, to tweet).
In particular, I’ve been looking at what I classify as the conceptual metaphors HUMAN COUPLES ARE BIRD COUPLES and HUMAN FAMILIES ARE BIRD FAMILIES. There are so many metaphorical linguistic expressions that express those twin concepts, such as brood, to fly the nest, empty nest syndrome, hen-pecked, and so on. During the courting phase, while nesting is going on, if all’s going well, there is likely to be much billing and cooing.
That phrase features too in the jazz classic Lullaby of Birdland, reprised by the late Amy Winehouse, and sung by earlier chanteuses like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
Lullaby of birdland, that’s what I
Always hear when you sigh.
Never in my wordland
Could there be ways to reveal
In a phrase how I feel.
Have you ever heard two turtle doves
Bill and coo when they love?
That’s the kind of magic
Music we make with our lips when we kiss.
(c) ‘B.Y. Forster’ – George David Weiss
(Stereo)typically it’s turtle doves who make this signature sound, to bill and coo, but other birds such as wood pigeons do it too. In fact, you’ll be lucky to see turtle doves in the British Isles: they are now on the RSPB’s red list (meaning population has declined by more than 50 per cent in the last 25years).
But what exactly is to bill and coo? A look in the data suggests it might not be quite what you think.
To coo, self-evidently, is a bird sound, specifically ‘To make the soft murmuring sound or note characteristic of doves and pigeons’ (OED). For an onomatopoeic word, its first written citation seems surprisingly late, coming as it does (see below) in the third quarter of the seventeenth century (‘late’ given that that e.g. to crow is first attested before 1000 and to clock, the forerunner of to cluck, c. 1050.)
So, two kind turtles, when a storm is nigh,
Look up, and see it gathering in the sky:
Each calls his mate, to shelter in the groves,
Leaving, in murmur, their unfinished loves:
Perched on some drooping branch, they sit alone,
And coo, and hearken to each other’s moan.
Dryden, The Conquest of Granada: II, ii, 82, 1672
And in case you’re wondering what reptiles are doing sitting on branches, turtle often stood for turtle dove in early modern English.
In contrast, the verb to bill dates to the early thirteenth century in the meaning ‘to peck’. Later it came to refer to birds stroking each other’s beaks, as turtle doves and some other birds do when mating. That gesture was then applied to humans, meaning ‘to caress, to make show of affection’ (OED) and is recorded earliest in 1609 (in Shakespeare) but only appears in conjunction with cooing in Thackeray (1854), at least according to the OED.
Cooing is something people do when they talk softly or sweetly, and typically they coo over something, particularly babies:
The midwife Sister Assunta delivered me and cooed over me for my name, Aidan, was that of the saint who had converted the heathens of the Western Isles of Scotland.
Now, Merriam-Webster labels to bill and coo ‘old-fashioned’, defines it as ‘to kiss and talk quietly’ and gives the example A young couple sat together in the corner, billing and cooing. That’s pretty much the OED meaning too, and the one that’s in my mental vocabulary, but in fact it’s a phrase which seems to have hopped a distance from its original perch, or at least had a little chick.
Oxford Online defines it more broadly as to ‘behave or talk in a very loving or sentimental way’ and includes among its small (for it) selection of four examples this one with its jaundiced view: The media arts are still young, but not so young, in my opinion, that we need to see more pieces which are catalogs of effects with nothing to say behind them, and then bill and coo over how wonderful they are.
What is going on in that last example? Nothing there suggests cosy coupledom, still less any reciprocal exchange of caresses and sweet nothings. Instead, the meaning can be summarised as ‘to gush effusively or fulsomely’. It looks as if in this use the meaning of bill has been bleached out and the word has instead been assimilated to the meaning of coo, merely serving to increase that verb’s intensity. (The corpus data shows that coo is often twinned with another verb, such as cuddle and coo, gurgle and coo, kiss and coo, and so forth.) In other words, the whole phrase works similarly to more obviously reduplicative phrases like to huff and puff and to ooh and aah but without the rhyme element. You cannot reverse the order of the elements in such phrases – of which English has hundreds – hence one of the terms to describe them: irreversible binomials. (When did you last eat chips and fish? Or engage in the thrust and cut of business? Or ride and park? You see how common they are).
The phrase is not particularly common — for examples, 58 examples for all forms in one corpus compared to well over 1,100 for to kiss and cuddle in all forms. That relative scarcity might explain the newly acquired meaning.
People coo over things (especially babies) and they doubleplus coo when they bill and coo. They can even get sentimental over money:
If he was a cartoon character, he’d be… It varies from game to game – from Mr Burns [sc. from The Simpsons], billing and cooing over his piles of cash…
Observer, 27 December 2015
The original meaning referring to birds and to lovers is still going strong, but this more generalised meaning also seems pretty well established. The next three examples show the original and the modified meanings:
In the distance, the sun dapples the river and wood pigeons gently bill and coo in the thicket of trees.
Big Issue, 18 May 2018
Peter and Olivia spent a lot of time billing and cooing.
Entertainment Weekly, 11 March 2011
It is a matter of personal pride when international celebrities bill and coo about overflowing theatres and rich film heritage of Kerala.
The Hindu, 24 March 2016.
And the data inevitably shows what looks like confirmation of ‘Butterfield’s Law’, which states that ‘If an idiomatic expression can be meaningfully eggcorned, it will be.’ Thus we have ‘bellowing and cooing’ where the context (a post about baby-sitting) suggests it really is billing that was misinterpreted and eggcorned: ‘At 3/2 years, the subject has trained his or her slaves to understand the intracacies [sic] of his or her bellowing and cooing, mewling and puking.’
