Turkey

[Dr. Goodword]

• turkey •

Pronunciation: têr-kee • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A large domestic food bird with a fan tail and a head and neck covered with a mass of bare skin, a favorite main course in the US on Thanksgiving and Christmas. 2. A stupid person. 3. A very bad piece of performance art, such as a play, movie, or symphony. 4. (Oldish) Nothing, not a word, diddledy, squat: "She never said turkey to me about it."

Notes: Animals often get bad raps from the words we use: squirrelly, hare-brained, catty, piggy—all reflect human prejudices about animals we interact with. A widely held fallacy is that turkeys look up at the sky with their beaks open during rainstorms and drown as a result. This misconception led to the conclusion that turkeys are stupid birds, hence the second and third meanings of today's holiday word.

In Play: We have now examined the word for the sound turkeys make, gobble, and the concept it contributed to, gobbledygook; it is time to look at the name of the animal itself. In addition to stupidity, turkeys are associated with plain speaking, as in "to talk turkey", but also in doing anything plainly, as in "to quit smoking cold turkey". For more about these phrases, read Dr. Goodword's Language Blog.

Word History: When Europeans began consuming exotic birds, they had problems keeping up with where they came from. These ancestors initially thought that guinea fowl came from Turkey, so they first called guinea fowl turkey-hens and turkey-cocks. Once the origin of the guinea fowl was correctly ascertained, the names turkey-hen and turkey-cock were left over, so they were transferred to what we call turkeys today. Thus, turkey comes from the name of the land of the Turks by means of two mistakes. But the English were not the only ones to mistake the origin of turkeys. Other Europeans came to the conclusion that turkeys came from India, hence the Russian name indushka, Polish indyk, and French dinde, a reduction of coq d'Inde "bird of India". In Portuguese a turkey is called a peru!

[Perry Lassiter]

I remember J Frank Dobie's book On the Open Range I read as a teen. He maintains the turkey is an intelligent bird. I remember a quote he included from a Native American. "I see a deer, and he thinks, 'Maybeso Indian, maybeso old stump,' and he goes on feeding. I see ac turkey, and he thinks, 'maybeso old stump, but maybeso Indian,' and he goes off."

Dobie also tells the story of a hunter calling turkeys on a quill, and has a wildcat land on his back!

Those of you who take Delancey Place will have seen today's article on turkeys. I found it informative.

[LukeJavan8]

Will have to dig out yesterday's Delancey.

Hereabouts, by the by, turkeys can fly. They roost in
trees at night, and that's the way they get up there.

[Philip Hudson]

Perry, Thanks for introducing the Agora to J Frank Dobie. The county of his nativity is Live Oak in Texas. I was also born there. Despite the trivia he wrote about the Indian, he was a great writer, perhaps the greatest regional writer in the USA. The theater (with a stage) in George West, Live Oak County, Texas is named after him. I just returned from a Story Telling Convocation there in which one of my students, a Chinese lady, wowed the audience.

Luke, wild turkeys can fly but not very well. Because people prefer the white meat of a turkey, they have been bred to have large breasts. Hence, domestic turkeys can't fly.

Wild turkeys are wily. I wouldn't be surprised if domesticated turkeys did open their mouths to the rain and thus drown. The breeding process for more white meat also served to make them as stupid as they are thought to be.

[LukeJavan8]

Remember, you are what you eat.

[Philip Hudson]

[Perry Lassiter]

Explains my wide-ranging curiosity, since I'm mostly omnivorous.