The Swearing Parrot

Now here is a really cool story and thank you to my friend Graham Beck for telling me about this.

At the Canadian Expo in 1967, there was the Guyana Pavilion which they shared with Barbados, probably to save costs. Both countries had recently become independent and this was a huge opportunity to advertise their independence.

They decided to send a number of Macaws, beautiful and colorful parrots that were indigenous to the region and known for their ability to learn and repeat words. One of the parrots was named Millie Amacore and she was going to be the star because, like my daughter, she could speak two languages.

So what happened?

Beautiful Millie apparently arrived at the show several weeks earlier, while construction was still in progress and as parrots do she listened to all the construction workers. Millie picked up the bad language from the construction workers as they were working on the pavilion or maybe they were teaching her?

When the Expo opened in April of 1967, visitors to the Guyana pavilion were greeted with Swearing Millie, in both French and English. So the little bird was expelled, banished, evicted from the world affair. In my opinion she was lucky that didn’t become a tasty dish. Actually I would have thought it was funny but in 1967 I was a young laddie.

But her not being turned into a tasty dish, she was featured on a set of  Christmas stamps from Guyana later that year. As Graham pointed out, Cussing Millie has nothing to do with Christmas, and her sole fame was her astonishing ability to swear in both English and French. But the incident was still fresh in the minds of everyone, so why not promote the young lady? Who knows, it may have brought tourism to the new country.

Note to self, be careful when I swear around my daughter, whether it be English, Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic or whatever. Maybe I should try not to swear until she is 18? Long wait!

Note: I received permission from Graham to do this. You can see the original here