Pigeonsaren’t particularly talkative birds . They favor to spend their sentence on window sills and Mungo Park statues rather than ottomans , all of which lead us to believe that the expressionstool pigeonwasn’t originally think of to be taken literally .
Indeed , several sources ( include the Online Etymology Dictionary ) indicate that the terminus most likely evolved from the Old French wordestale , which date back to the 1400s and was used to describe adecoy bird(often a pigeon ) used to tempt bird of prey into a mesh . When it entered the English language , the initialewas dismiss from the Christian Bible andstalewas used to refer to a person or thing used as a lure to entrap a mortal . ( William Shakespearewas referring to burglar bait when he wrote “ The gimcrackery in my house , go bring it hither for stale to catch these thieves ” inThe Tempest . )
The phrasestool pigeonfirst appeared sometime during the early 1800s , withNoah Websterusing it todescribea pigeon hunt tactic where a pigeon was tied to a moving stool to make the bird flutter and draw in a large flock of pigeon for gentle spotting . But the animal uses are comparatively rarified compared to the frequency with which the phrase is used to describe people who infiltrate a criminal go-ahead and then report back to police enforcement force with their finding just to curry favour with the local cops . The first uses ofstool pigeonto describe police force betrayer occurred inthe 1840s , according to the Oxford English Dictionary .
Many etymologist suppose that the association between the phrase and an genuine physical stool pigeon is a false etymology , not least of all because address to the hunting method are exceedingly rare , while reference book to it as a person are unwashed .
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A version of this story range in 2016 ; it has been updated for 2023 .
