Marks & Spencer’s (as we still call it) has designated 27 June National Picky Bits Day. It entails eating things like olives and dips straight from their packaging. An evening meal of this kind is called a picky tea. It is, of course, a class minefield.
‘So what’s going on here, are we having a children’s party?’ asked Mary Berry when she was presented with a picky tea on Radio 1 three years ago. ‘I think I’m right in saying you have cooked none of this,’ she continued as she inspected the goods.
On St George’s Day this year, the Scottish edition of the Times had a strap across the front page declaring that readers would find inside details of ‘The best supermarket “picky bits”.’ The journalist Merryn Somerset Webb, educated at Wycombe Abbey and Caius, asked on X: ‘Anyone else find the phrase “picky bits” a bit repellent?’ Others did, mentioning bogeys. Scabs could have figured too. But someone accused her of ‘sneering at the words the proles use to describe their dins dins’. I wondered whether it was a Scottish phrase. The Scots have used bit instead of a bite to eat, with bit and bed meaning ‘bed and board’. And, as in English English, to pick at food is to have a reduced meal. ‘The dainner wiz a meeserable, pickit concern,’ the Scottish National Dictionary records from 1866.
My husband remembers Pickin’ a Chicken, a hit 78rpm from 1955, by the too cheery Eve Boswell: ‘Can’t you imagine what a thrill it will be/ Pickin’ a chicken with me?’ This was definitely picking as a bird picks, or a toothpick picks, although picking in the sense of ‘choosing’ shares the same derivation. The Americans talk of the President’s pick for a post, rather than his choice. Yet choosy was originally an Americanism: ‘In the matter of pyjamas I’ve always been a trifle on the choosy side,’ declared Bertie Wooster in 1936, whose creator had a foot on either side of the Atlantic.
Language changes beside custom, and where a picky tea might have once consisted of leftovers, it now entails grazing from the fridge or picnicking entirely on shop-made finger-food.
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