Have you ever seen a chicken with a bar of soap in its beak? Come to Bluffton

I finally got my answer this week on which comes first in Bluffton.

It is the chicken.

Not the egg.

At least when it comes to that offensive breed, the fricken chicken, a bird so “street” you can practically hear the click of its switchblade and smell the grease in its head feathers.

The fricken chicken is an unsavory yet savory fowl that forces anyone who passes it to utter a savory yet unsavory word into the very delicate ears of town folk.

It is a species so ready to rumble that it hatches before its egg has been properly incubated.

When Andy Fishkind brought that chicken egg here, he had no idea it could wreak this level of havoc without so much as a crack in that shell.

He hadn’t even signed the lease on an Old Town building that does not yet exist for his restaurant idea that is still just in the pen and paper phase, when his longtime hope of opening a Peruvian chicken restaurant called Andes’ Fricken Chicken — simply because he craves Peruvian chicken and wants to give people the “best fricken chicken they have ever had” — got scrambled.

This all started with a late-August Town of Bluffton Planning Commission meeting in which plans for the Fricken Chicken building made it through the pre-approval process but with the added unsolicited advice of a commission member who noted that he found the name of the potential tenant to be rather impolite.

Then, this past week, the not-yet-on-any-business-license-application business name was brought up at a town meeting.

Because “fricken” is a substitute for the king of all bad words.

Which makes it a gateway word, I suppose.

The kind of word that forms the kind of offensive sound that leads to other kinds of more offensive sounds until the town’s sensibilities have nowhere to go but down the gutter and into the May River.

It’s this type of language that can turn us all into late night talk show hosts and street talkers if we let it, the sort of people who say words like “fricken” in the first place, as former Bluffton Mayor Emmett McCracken pointed out at the meeting.

How can we function as a community if we’re constantly introducing “our next fricken guest” while inexplicably leaning on streetlight posts?

Town Councilman Dan Wood called the word a slippery slope.

“If it’s ‘fricken’ today, it’s going to be something else tomorrow, and this will continue to come to Bluffton,” he said.

In other words, we’re on to you members of the Bring Bad Words to Bluffton Business Brands Club. We know your plans. Step 1. Get Fricken Chicken approved and accepted by whimsical town. Step 2. Laugh maniacally. Step 3. “Order more letter F’s, S’s, B’s, A’s and C’s, Jimmy, because we have some nasty business signs to make.”

Some local parents have said they don’t want to have to explain this word to their etymologically curious chicken-loving children.

I get it.

But my Roman Catholic mom has a solution for that.

When I was 9, I needed some clarification on the meaning of the Madonna song I was singing along to on the car radio.

“Mom, what does ‘virgin’ mean?”

“It’s a woman who doesn’t drink alcohol.”

“So Jesus’ mom ....”

“Right ... didn’t order daiquiris.”

“Interesting.”

She never cleared this up, either.

Which, obviously, explains why I’m halfway through my life and only just now found out that “fricken” is considered an actual bad word and not the benign thing we say to prevent saying the bad word.

I had no idea.

I honestly assumed Fricken Chicken was an expression of the Peruvian chicken’s incorrigible but overwhelmingly delicious nature.

My apologies to the villagers.

Bluffton Mayor Lisa Sulka told me Friday she considers “fricken” to be “scruffy language,” which is a delightful description that gets to the heart of the issue.

What town wants to be scruffy? Certainly not a growing one like Bluffton. Scruffy towns don’t get themselves on Best Places lists. Scruffy towns don’t make people brag to their friends about where they live.

Though one chicken restaurant name is certainly not going to take us down, though the Saga of Fricken Chicken is a sign of the times as Bluffton continues to figure out how to maintain its quaint but quirky identity while it expands and diversifies.

But the saga is over. Fishkind put an end Friday to all the face-fanning and dictionary-pointing.

“The truth is, we are most passionate about the chicken and other wood-fired specialties than we are the name, so we’ll take the high road and work towards a new name,” he wrote in an email. “Now let’s get back to focusing on the real issues.”

Fishkind is a Southern gentleman who is polite and friendly but, like me, doesn’t consider “fricken” to be a bad word. When he says the word, it registers as enthusiasm.

“I want people to eat my chicken and say ‘This is the best fricken chicken I’ve ever had,” he said.

He plans to open the restaurant in mid-2017. Even without his long-dreamed-of business name, he’s still excited about finally seeing it all come together, and he’s especially proud of the logo of his fricken chicken.

Even if people want to put soap in its beak.

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Have you ever seen a chicken with a bar of soap in its beak? Come to Bluffton."