Chicken Feed / Peanut

This Special English program Words and Their Stories was written by Jerilyn Watson. This is Susan Clark.

Chicken feed also has another interesting meaning known to history experts and World War Two spies and soldiers. Spy expert Henry S.A. Becket writes that some German's spies working in London during the War, also worked for the British. The British government had to make the German believes the spies were working. So British officials gave them mostly false information, it was called chicken feed.

The saying person who protesting his work for chicken feed, may also say "I am working for peanuts." She means she is working for a small amount of money. It is very different meaning from main one in a dictionary that meaning is small nuts that grow on a plant. No one knows for sure how a word for something to eat also came to mean something very small. But a peanut is a very small food.

Almost every language in the world has a saying that a person can never be too rich. Americans like people in other countries always want more money. One way they express this is by protesting that their jobs do not pay enough. A common expression is "I am working for chicken feed." It means working for very little money.

When you add the word gallery to the word peanut, you have the name of an area in an American theater. A gallery is a high sitting area or balcony above the main floor. The peanut gallery got its name because it is the part of the theatre most distant from where the show takes place. So peanut- gallery tickets usually cost less than other tickets. People pay a small amount of money for them.

The expression probably began because seeds fed to chickens made people think of small change. Small change means metal coins of not much value, like nickels which are worth five cents.