The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Turkey

Early explorers in the Americas saw flocks of turkeys singing in the magnolia forests, for the turkey is native to America. Indeed, it was domesticated and eaten by the Aztecs. Why it should therefore be named after a country in Asia Minor is a little odd, but explicable.

Many animals are misnamed. Guinea pigs, for example, aren’t pigs and they aren’t from Guinea. They are found in Guyana in South America, and it takes only a little mispronunciation to move them across the Atlantic. The pig bit is just weird.

The same is true of the helmeted guinea fowl, or Numidia meleagris, which was once native to Madagascar but not Guinea. The helmeted guinea fowl is an ugly bird. It has a big bony knob on the top of its head (hence the name), but it tastes delicious.

People started importing helmeted guinea fowl from Madagascar to Europe, and the people who did the importing were usually Turkish traders. They were known as Turkey merchants, and the birds that they brought were therefore called turkeys. But those aren’t the turkeys that we eat at Christmas with bread sauce and relatives. That bird is Meleagris gallopavo, which is also delicious.

It was the Spanish conquistadors who found Meleagris gallopavo in the magnolia forests and brought it back to Europe. It became popular in Spain and then in North Africa. And though it’s a different species from the helmeted guinea fowl, the two birds do look surprisingly alike.

People got confused. The birds looked the same, tasted similar and both were exotic new dishes brought from Somewhere Foreign. So it was assumed that they were the same thing, and the American bird got called turkey as well, in the mistaken belief that it was a bird that was mistakenly believed to come from Turkey.

In Turkey itself, of course, they didn’t make this mistake. They knew the bird wasn’t theirs. So the Turks made a completely different mistake and called it a hindi, because they thought the bird was probably Indian. The French thought the same and they still call turkey dindon or d’Inde, which also means from India. It’s a most confusing bird but delicious.

In fact it was so delicious that, though it was introduced to England only in the 1520s or 30s, it had become the standard Christmas meal by the 1570s. None of which explains why people occasionally talk turkey. Indeed, they demand to talk turkey. This all goes back to an old joke, that isn’t, I’m afraid, very funny.

The joke involves a turkey and a buzzard. Now, it may be possible to eat buzzard. I don’t know. But the bird’s absence from any menu that I’ve ever encountered makes me suspicious. I suspect the buzzard is a foul fowl, and that’s certainly the point of the story.

Once upon a time, a white man and a Red Indian went out hunting together. They killed a tasty turkey and a buzzard. So the white man said to his companion: ‘You take the buzzard and I’ll take the turkey, or, if you prefer, I can take the turkey and you can take the buzzard.’

To which the Red Indian replied: ‘You don’t talk turkey at all.’

This joke was immensely popular in nineteenth-century America. It was even quoted in Congress, though history doesn’t recall whether anybody laughed. But it was popular enough to spawn two phrases.

By 1919 talking turkey had been altered somewhat: people had started inserting the adjective cold. Talking cold turkey is like talking turkey only more so. You were getting beyond the brass tacks and down to the barest of bare essentials. Talking cold turkey was the bluntest, directest form of speech.

And a couple of years later, in 1921, people started to use the phrase cold turkey to describe the bluntest, most direct method of giving up drugs.

So going cold turkey has nothing whatsoever to do with the miserable leftovers so sorrowfully consumed in the week after Christmas. Cold turkey isn’t a food at all, even though it sounds like one. It’s a blunt way of talking, and a blunt way of giving up drugs.

However, when you give someone the cold shoulder, that is a food.