The sense of chick meaning “girlfriend” is of American origin, circa 1940. For those of us born after that, it is hard to imagine the word meaning “child” but that was indeed its predominant metaphoric usage from Middle English on.

My Chicks on this gravestone means simply My Children: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" [KJV, Matthew 23:37]

In 1792, John Wolcott wrote (in A Pair of Lyric Epistles to Lord Macartney and his Ship): “Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin." This was apparently the first recorded example of the expression “grin like a Cheshire cat”. Lewis Carroll’s fleshing out of the feline came in 1865. There is much speculation about the origin of the phrase but it remains lost in time.

According to Martin Gardner (in The Annotated Alice), there are two leading theories: A sign painter in Cheshire painted grinning lions on the signboards of inns in the area, and/or Cheshire cheeses were at one time molded in the shape of a grinning cat. Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang speculates that Cheshire may just be a corruption of cheeser, i.e. a cat that likes cheese.

In a previous entry, I introduced my own speculation that Lewis Carroll intended the Cheshire Cat as a deliberate metaphor for the moon. John Heywood wrote (Proverbes, 1546): "The moon is made of a greene cheese." This old joke was likely no more than a mocking of reasoning based on similarity — assuming most cheeses back then were formed in round molds. The greene means “new” (unaged) and can be taken as a just-created full moon (which is, of course, promptly “eaten” back to nothingness).

There is a description in Lewis Carroll’s 1874 The Hunting Of The Snark of The Baker (the central character in this nonsense poem) that goes: “His intimate friends called him ‘Candle-ends’, and his enemies ‘Toasted-cheese’.” One can see why candle-ends might be a compliment: They are the bright, illuminating parts of a candle. But in what sense is toasted-cheese a taunt?

Apparently, Winsor McCay knew. His Dream of the Rarebit Fiend comic strip (1904-1913) illustrated someone’s increasingly unreal nightmare — only to awake in the final panel and regret having previously eaten some rarebit. Welsh rarebit, sometimes corrupted to Welsh rabbit, was nothing more than toasted-cheese. Why would it have been nightmare-inducing? Lactose intolerance comes to mind, or just plain indigestion: Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, at first doubts his senses (regarding the reality of Marley’s Ghost) because “a slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, ...”

So, toasted-cheese caused a kind of madness, worthy of a taunt. The moon also was at one time believed to have caused madness — quite literally, lunacy. Perhaps one can now begin to understand why: Since the moon is made of cheese, the sun’s heating action creates moonbeams that are really toasted-cheese rays. Maddening!