Chickens Don’t Have Fingers, I Don’t Have Teeth

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. To my first-time listeners, I hope you decide to stick around, because I’m glad you’re here. And to my returning listeners, it’s great to have you here with me again. When was the last time you got into trouble or caused a scene? Was it intentional?

I had the opportunity to go to a pretty popular fast food chain today that I had never been to before. It’s a place called Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, and you might be able to guess, based on the name, that they specialize in chicken fingers. If you’ve never had chicken fingers before, you may be a little confused. Chickens don’t have fingers. They have wings and feathers, feet, toes, and claws, but no fingers. So when you hear “chicken fingers,” you can know that it’s not referring to an actual part of the chicken. Instead, it’s referring to a specific and incredibly delicious way of preparing chicken.

In order to fully understand the nuances of American cuisine, it may be helpful to compare three popular menu items. The words are chicken tenders, chicken fingers, and chicken nuggets. These American delicacies may appear to be the same at first glance, but there are subtle yet important differences that distinguish them from each other. Chicken tenders are made from a specific cut of the chicken called the tenderloin. It’s one of the juiciest and most flavorful parts of the chicken. Chicken fingers are named this way because of their shape. They are long and thin, often cut from the breast meat. Chicken nuggets are often shaped from ground chicken instead of a specific part. They are typically much shorter than tenders or fingers, and can often be bought in interesting and unusual shapes. You might find dinosaur nuggets, or star-shaped nuggets, or even nuggets shaped like the state of Texas. All three of these American staple foods are typically breaded or battered and fried, but you may find some restaurants that offer breadless chicken tenders as an option.

Now, a small confession before we go on: while that distinction is real, and worth being able to recognize, in everyday casual conversation most Americans use “tenders” and “fingers” completely interchangeably. If a friend says they’re grabbing chicken tenders and comes back with something the menu called fingers, nobody bats an eye. It’s a useful difference to know, but not a rule anyone’s enforcing.

So, as I said, I went to Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers for the first time today, and it was great! They have wonderfully crispy chicken, and a special dipping sauce that is to die for, meaning it’s incredibly good. The food is top-notch, but the name is a bit unusual. Which brings me to the phrase for today: raise Cain.

Raise Cain. Now, here’s a fun twist before we even get to the meaning. That restaurant, Raising Cane’s, is actually named after the founder’s dog, a yellow Labrador named Cane. And the dog was named after this very expression. There’s just one wrinkle: the restaurant and the dog spell it C-A-N-E, like a walking cane or sugar cane, but the original idiom is spelled C-A-I-N, like the name. That’s not an accident, and the reason takes us all the way back to one of the oldest stories in the Bible.

To “raise Cain” means to cause trouble, to make a commotion, to be loud and disruptive. The Cain in the phrase is the biblical Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, who, in the book of Genesis, becomes the first person to commit murder when he kills his brother Abel out of jealousy. Over the centuries, his name became a kind of shorthand for chaos and wrongdoing. There’s an old meaning of the word “raise” that means to summon or conjure a spirit, so to “raise Cain” originally painted the picture of calling up the troublemaking spirit of Cain himself. It’s a close cousin of a phrase you may know: “raise hell.” The version we use today first showed up in America around the 1840s.

Keep that phrase in mind. You’ll see it running through the rest of today’s episode, in more than one generation of my family.

Sometimes it seems that Eliana is determined to raise some Cain around our little apartment. As she’s become more mobile, she’s simultaneously learned how to get into more trouble. No matter how well I think I’ve cleaned the house, she has the uncanny ability to find a piece of hair or a dead bug on the floor to try and put in her mouth. She loves to pull books off the shelves she can reach and spread them all over the floor. She even seems to have figured out how to stand on the piles of books she makes to reach even higher shelves. She has recently learned to climb onto and over things. She has tried climbing our bookshelves after clearing them of all their books, climbing over the back of our couch, and climbing over the barriers we set up to keep her out of the kitchen. I love her spirit of exploration, but since she has no sense of self-preservation, it can often cause problems.

Seeing how much of a handful our little daughter can be has made me wonder if I used to get into similar amounts of trouble when I was her age. I obviously don’t remember what I was like back when I was almost a year old. But I have an interesting story of what I was like a few years later, when I was about three. I only remember bits and pieces, so most of this comes from how my mom tells the story.

This was just a bit before we moved to Dallas, Texas, to be near my cousins, so we were still in Provo, Utah at the time. I had gotten a nice little bicycle with training wheels a few months before, and I rode it all the time. As I’d ride around our apartment complex with my mom, I’d see the older kids riding their bikes. They were so cool, and they didn’t have the silly training wheels attached to the back wheel like I did. These training wheels were easily removable with just a couple of simple tools, and I begged my mom to take them off. For a couple of weeks I persisted, until finally she gave in. The baby wheels were coming off. I was finally going to be one of the big kids.

My mom thought I was going to fall right away, cry for a bit, and then we’d put the training wheels back on. Things didn’t turn out the way she expected. Without any hesitation, I zoomed off, comfortable and confident. I didn’t fall once.

Days, maybe weeks, passed. I’d been riding on two wheels practically every day. Then I saw some older kids out in our neighborhood doing something exciting. They’d set up a ramp and were doing jumps and tricks off it. The ramp looked large and intimidating to my three-year-old eyes, but what they were doing seemed so interesting. I decided to try it out on a slightly smaller scale.

There’s a part of the sidewalk called the cut. Sidewalks are raised a few inches above the street, and the cut is where the sidewalk slopes down to meet the road. I decided I would use the slight incline of the curb at the cut as a ramp, and try to land a jump.

That’s when disaster struck. I didn’t stick the landing. I flew off my bike and slammed my teeth into the curb. There was screaming, and there were tears. Blood was everywhere. I was being watched by a teenage babysitter at the time, who was horrified, and probably terrified that she’d accidentally let me die on her watch. It was quite the scene, to be sure. And I spent the next five years of my life without front teeth.

Now, here’s something I’ve been thinking about. Eliana likes to raise Cain, and she knows it. She often makes sure to get my attention right before she does something she’s not supposed to do. But in the story I just shared about my bike accident, I wasn’t trying to cause trouble at all. I wasn’t raising Cain. I think there’s a better phrase for what I was doing: “playing with fire.”

To play with fire means to do something risky or dangerous, something that could easily end in harm, whether or not you realize it at the time. And here’s the important contrast with our first phrase. When you raise Cain, you mean to cause a commotion. It’s on purpose. But when you play with fire, the trouble isn’t really the point. You’re chasing something exciting, and the danger is just riding along quietly beside it, waiting.

The idea behind this phrase is ancient. For as long as humans have used fire, we’ve known it can warm you or burn you, depending on how carefully you handle it. But one of the earliest times someone wrote it down in the way we mean it today was all the way back in 1655, when an English poet described playing with fire and never once thinking that the fire would actually burn him. I love that, because it captures the whole feeling exactly. It isn’t the description of a troublemaker. It’s the description of someone who simply didn’t believe the danger was real, right up until it was.

That was me, at three years old, staring down my little sidewalk ramp. I wasn’t trying to misbehave. I wasn’t raising Cain. I just wanted to be like the big kids, and I truly did not believe I would fall. I was playing with fire, and I got burned. Or, in my case, I lost my front teeth.

You don’t need a bike to do it, either. Someone who keeps replying to a flirtatious coworker while they’re already in a relationship is playing with fire. Someone who puts off studying until the night before a huge exam is playing with fire. In each case, no one is trying to cause a disaster. They’re just standing a lot closer to one than they realize.

So here’s something to think about the next time there’s trouble, on TV, in a book, or in your own life. Was someone “raising Cain,” or “playing with fire”? Remember the difference. One of them means to stir things up. The other one just forgot that the fire was hot.

Going through life, we’re bound to have moments when we cause problems. Now we have two good phrases for the two flavors of that. Sometimes we raise Cain, stirring up trouble on purpose, the way my daughter does when she catches my eye and reaches for the exact thing she knows she shouldn’t. And sometimes we play with fire, chasing something thrilling and getting burned by a danger we never really thought about.

Watching Eliana test every limit in our apartment, I see both versions. I catch myself hoping she’ll be the rare kid who learns why the bookcase is dangerous before she ever falls off of it. But if I’m honest, I already know the truth, because I lived it. I didn’t learn about that curb from a warning. I learned it with my teeth.

So maybe the best I can do is stay close, keep the falls as small as I can, and be there to help her back up when the fire does what fire does. Because some lessons, the ones that really stick, only ever seem to land when the going gets tough, when the fall has already happened and the fire’s already burned.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.