On the Origins of Flicken

Back when I was a child, I was eating a dinner of chicken with one of my friends (now my former brother-in-law). In all seriousness, he ripped the skin off of his piece of chicken and tossed it forcefully over his shoulders so that it hit the wall behind him with an audible slap. "Fat's bad for you," he said augustly. Not only did I find the situation hilarious, but it stayed with me over the years.

Then when I was an undergrad at UBC, I was friends with a brilliant, yet arrogant, East German chap. I thought his accent was pretty cool, and given how bright and arrogant he was, making ridiculous statements in mock-German was somewhat of a past-time for me. Once while I was IM'ing him (this was in 1994 using the talk program under Unix), we exchanged thusly:

Me: Flicken.
Him: Flicken?
Me: Ich flicken mein chicken.

Later in life, I found out that the intelligent (and possibly pedantic) way to accept blame was to say Mea culpa, so once when I made a mistake while working at Siberra, I wanted to accept blame yet not be too stuffy. I wrote, "Mea culpa und Ich flicken mein chicken." Strangely enough, my sense of humour had a one-man cheerleading team composed of an Israeli-Canadian. He absolutely loved this statement, telling me that Jews actually did flick chickens on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. All of a sudden, it all made sense: Mea culpa is an admission of fault, suitable for atonement, and so what do you do about this fault? You flick a chicken, of course! Without intending to, I had pithily summarized the entire ethos of Yom Kippur.