If all Tootsie the foul-mouthed parrot ever said was that he wanted a cracker, he wouldn’t have been sold off to a new owner. But his seller, Richard Mills of Philadelphia, grew tired of the bird’s antics, particularly when Tootsie’s lewd language became a bad influence on the man’s two other parrots. Until Tootsie joined the household, their morals had reportedly “hitherto been above suspicion.”
Prior to the Mills home, Tootsie lived in a local café populated by regulars who corrupted the impressionable young parrot with their frequent profanities. When Mills elected to give him a better home, he was guaranteed that his new feathered friend didn’t swear. That guarantee was broken within a day.
Efforts to correct Tootsie’s crooked tongue did no good whatsoever. In fact, when Mills threw water at him for swearing, Tootsie sweared at him for doing it. Still he remained optimistic that the bird would clean up his act, but when one of the other parrots started saying, “Darn it!” Mills had had enough. Tootsie had to go. An ad was placed and made no attempt to hide the vulgar creature’s problems, acknowledging that the “only reason for selling is that the bird swears in his vocabulary.”
Among Tootsie’s shameful phrases were, “Go to blazes and shut the door,” “Come up and have a drink, every dashed one of you,” and “Blast your eyes, you son of a sea cook.” The article added that the bird’s more colorful language could only be expressed “by dashes and asterisks.”
Luckily, a widow, whose husband had been a seafaring man with a filthy tongue of his own, responded to the ad and welcomed Tootsie’s obscenities. “It would seem like home again to have the dear bird around,” she explained.
