@norightturnnz.bsky.social the best results that came up for the phrase "strapping the chicken" were several of your blog post titles and I know the meaning a "forcing the desired answer by tinkering with the terms, facts, or question you're asking" ... But where does the phrase originate?
Tagging in the Public Address crew, as that's the only other place it's come up in my searches... Is it a particularly NZ lefty politics thing that I've taken to have wider usage?
My recollection is that the phrase comes from US missile(?) tests which were designed to pass because of ridiculous constraints they put on them to ensure they passed. Only know it via I/S.
Thankyou! Confirms what I was finding as being military idiom in origin, as the "strap down chicken test" - strapping the chicken down to claim that your solution was lethal to chickens, when the problem was getting a clear shot on them through the trees...
But by all the gods, Google search has gone downhill, even when using phrase operators etc. Chicken seems to have sent it down a "he's looking for recipes" path, and interpreting strapped as "how to truss a chicken for roasting"
...but I think I originally read about it elsewhere. They explained it as wanting to find out if shotguns kill chickens, so you strap a chicken to the table, kill it, and conclude that shotguns are effective. The test of course does not reflect the real world.
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