I see the article says Hebrew calls it “chicken of India”, though it does not mention that in France turkey is “dinde”, originally “poule d’Inde”, ie also chicken of India. And of course the native Americans were known as Indians in past times.
It seems odd that – according to the article – turkeys made it from America to Spain and thence to England via Turkey/ Turkish merchants, as the Ottoman empire and western European Christendom spent much of the 16thC in a bunch of wars on land and sea. In the earlier part of Henry VIII’s reign, first third of the 16thC while he was married to Catherine of Aragon (of Spain), you’d think a more direct route for turkeybirds might have been via Spain. But there you go.
It’s also not clear that it’s a mistake, that people actually thought they came from Turkey or India. It may just be that “Turkey” and “India” were general slang terms for “Exotic/Far-Off Lands”, so it just meant “eatin’ bird from far away.”
What I don’t get is why everyone went with “chicken” and not “goose”, which would seem to fit the size, cooking methods, and temperament better.
Next etymological step: how did ‘turkey’ become a derogatory word . . . like, ‘he’s a real turkey’ when referring to, say, an eejit?
Are people referred to as turkeys? I know, for instance, that unsuccessful films and albums are called turkeys, but I assumed that is because they don’t “fly” to the higher reaches of sales heaven. Especially large and bloated projects of which much was expected… I don’t think anyone calls a very small low-budget indie production a turkey if it isn’t box office gold.
Turkeys can’t fly? What?!
Also, Turkey in Norwegian is “kalkun” (similar in Swedish and Danish and also Dutch, I believe). It’s from “Calicut-hen”, ie. chicken from Calicut, India (today Kozhikode).
kalkoen in Dutch, altho I don’t think I ever heard my parents use that word. But then, we didn’t have traditional Thanksgivings, either.
German has two (or four) words for the birds, depending on whether you want to distinguish gender and/or domestication: male: “Truthahn” or “Puter“; female: “Truthenne” or “Pute“. In normal usage, the terms in bold are much more common, the other two are technically “correct”, but virtually never heard. The German etymology traces both “trut” and “put” back to an onomatopoetic form (for the noise they make), possibly contaminated by a very old form of the verb for “threaten”. Officially, the two “Pute(r)” forms refer to the domesticated bird and the “Trut-” forms to the wild variety, but don’t think that this is observed in normal speech outside of hunting circles.
P.S. @ Andréa – Only one of the four German words is used as (part of) an insult: “dumme Pute” is a very derogatory term for an unintelligent female.
P.P.S. The German article noted that the English term “Turkey” was originally used for what is now called “guinea hen” (in English), and that when the other bird showed up, the same term was also applied to it. It also mentioned “Indian” or “Calcutta chicken” as being used in French (are you still reading this, Olivier?)
P.P.P.S. Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin wanting the turkey to be the American emblem (instead of the eagle); if that had actually happened, Armstrong would have been able to exclaim, “The Turkey has landed!“
“Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin…” Heh, “canard” — I see what you did there.
Kilby, “Turkey” would gave been an unfortunate name for the LEM, since I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly.
Kind of a geezer joke, but “there’s a difference when your boss say, ‘let’s talk turkey’ or ‘let’s talk, turkey.”
[Re: P.P.P.S. Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin wanting the turkey to be the American emblem (instead of the eagle); if that had actually happened, Armstrong would have been able to exclaim, “The Turkey has landed!“
Re: Kilby, “Turkey” would gave been an unfortunate name for the LEM, since I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly. ]
…
But if the turkey had been our national emblem in stead of the eagle, then wouldn’t the roles have been reversed, with “eagle” meaning a flop?
@ CIDU Bill – “…I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly…”
Those domesticated lardballs bear a fleeting similarity to lead balloons, but wild birds are another matter:
And would golfers celebrate a turkey as even better than a birdie?
I prefer the name “gobbler.”
@ Mitch4 – A “birdie” is one under par, and an “eagle” is two under par. Scoring three under par is even rarer than a hole-in-one, since it can only happen with the second shot on a par-5 hole, and is called an “albatross“.
Kilby, yes, I was trying to follow suit from previous comments about “what if ‘turkey’ replaced ‘eagle’?”.
But the three-under “albatross” in golf was indeed a pleasing surprise!
And to pursue “albatross” into music, we have first an instrumental from blues-era Fleetwood Mac with some excellent covers. And then .. no, it would take more than one more stroke to reach composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor.
And pursuing ‘albatross’ into . . .
(I didn’t realize that ‘A Wish for Wings That Work’ – which we were discussing previously somewhere – is on YouTube (of course it is) . . .
For “turkey” being an insult — domestic turkeys have a reputation as being particularly dumb. The story goes that they have been known to look up in the rain, open their mouths, and drown. I doubt it’s actually true, but that’s the reputation.
Wild turkeys, on the other hand, are smart and vicious. Wild turkeys are a reminder that therapod dinosaurs never went extinct.and would do perfectly fine if you time-traveled them back to the Jurassic.
We had a ‘gang’ of ’em come almost to the front door of the house 12/23/17 – I think there were 20 or so. They did look kind of – not exactly vicious but I sure didn’t want to be out there with ’em!
(Yes, we have all sorts of wildlife come visit – we live in a conservancy area, right next to a nature preserve. Makes for interesting times . . . coyotes, a herd of deer living in the high grass next door and eating the flowers in my hanging baskets [I quickly learned what plants are deer-resistant] and attempting to eat an artificial holiday wreath, supposed bobcat sightings, kids destroying the golf course, [supposed] bear & cubs sighting [altho it being Fourth of July, I put that ‘sighting’ down to Jack Daniels], alligators [‘Where there’s water, there’re alligators”], turkeys in trees who’ve obviously NOT watched the WCRP episode and DO fly, as well as limpkins, ibises, cranes, herons and endangered wood storks.)
Mmm…theropod with cranberry sauce and stuffing….
Kilby — I’m not a golfer and so this is perhaps a stupid question, but is there some rule that no hole on a gold course can be higher than par four? (Given the popularity of extreme sports, I’d expect some folks to set up Extreme Golf Courses with much more difficult holes (“par seventeen, and that’s only if you get your chip shot over the alligator moat….”).
Englebrecht, the famed Dward Surrealist Boxer (he specializes in boxing grandfather clocks, but also has other sportsoid skills) starred in a story about a golf course that covered the entire earth, but I don’t recall if it was one of the original stories by Maurice Richardson or one of the (also very good) more recent patiches by Rhys Hughes.
@ Shrug – Standard golf holes are either par 3, 4, or 5. I once heard of par 6 holes for women, but that may be antiquated, and certainly does not apply to professional courses. A typical 18-hole course has something like ten par-4s, four par-3s, and four par-5s. Variations abound, but the total is usually 72, sometimes 71, or 70.
‘. . . and that’s only if you get your chip shot over the alligator moat….”.
Alligator moats/ponds are ‘par for the course’ here in FL, I’ve found out. Literally.
P.S. Speaking of “albatross” (I wanted to link to the video but could not find a URL that worked well from here).
this one?
Link to a list of covers. Fleetwood original is in embedded video.
The cover I particularly like doesn’t seem to be listed, an ad hoc Bay Area group that back Connie Champagne (tho ofc she doesn’t sing on this instrumental track).
And turkeywork needlework has nothing to do with bird – but probably does come from the country as it like a rug.
Turkey as a country did not exist until after WWI in 1923. There were Turks before that, but the area they lived in covered a huge swath of the middle east and Asia. Huns (as in Attilia, not the Germans) were considered to be Turks.
So while the turkey may have been named after the Turks – it was named long before there was a country called Turkey.
That should actually be that turkeywork probably comes from the middle east area as it is like a rug.
There was a musical style or form called “Turkish March” in Classical/Romantic era European music. Mozart has a famous one, and one of my favorite bits within the finale (“Ode to Joy”) of Beethoven’s Ninth is the Turkish March section right by the tenor solo.
AFAIK, this so-called Turkish style did not have really genuine roots in the music of Asia Minor or the Turks as a people, but reflected what earlier European composers had written to convey an impression of Orientalism. But I have not read up on it recently, so perhaps corrections are in order.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I see the article says Hebrew calls it “chicken of India”, though it does not mention that in France turkey is “dinde”, originally “poule d’Inde”, ie also chicken of India. And of course the native Americans were known as Indians in past times.
It seems odd that – according to the article – turkeys made it from America to Spain and thence to England via Turkey/ Turkish merchants, as the Ottoman empire and western European Christendom spent much of the 16thC in a bunch of wars on land and sea. In the earlier part of Henry VIII’s reign, first third of the 16thC while he was married to Catherine of Aragon (of Spain), you’d think a more direct route for turkeybirds might have been via Spain. But there you go.
It’s also not clear that it’s a mistake, that people actually thought they came from Turkey or India. It may just be that “Turkey” and “India” were general slang terms for “Exotic/Far-Off Lands”, so it just meant “eatin’ bird from far away.”
What I don’t get is why everyone went with “chicken” and not “goose”, which would seem to fit the size, cooking methods, and temperament better.
Next etymological step: how did ‘turkey’ become a derogatory word . . . like, ‘he’s a real turkey’ when referring to, say, an eejit?
Are people referred to as turkeys? I know, for instance, that unsuccessful films and albums are called turkeys, but I assumed that is because they don’t “fly” to the higher reaches of sales heaven. Especially large and bloated projects of which much was expected… I don’t think anyone calls a very small low-budget indie production a turkey if it isn’t box office gold.
Turkeys can’t fly? What?!
Also, Turkey in Norwegian is “kalkun” (similar in Swedish and Danish and also Dutch, I believe). It’s from “Calicut-hen”, ie. chicken from Calicut, India (today Kozhikode).
kalkoen in Dutch, altho I don’t think I ever heard my parents use that word. But then, we didn’t have traditional Thanksgivings, either.
German has two (or four) words for the birds, depending on whether you want to distinguish gender and/or domestication: male: “Truthahn” or “Puter“; female: “Truthenne” or “Pute“. In normal usage, the terms in bold are much more common, the other two are technically “correct”, but virtually never heard. The German etymology traces both “trut” and “put” back to an onomatopoetic form (for the noise they make), possibly contaminated by a very old form of the verb for “threaten”. Officially, the two “Pute(r)” forms refer to the domesticated bird and the “Trut-” forms to the wild variety, but don’t think that this is observed in normal speech outside of hunting circles.
P.S. @ Andréa – Only one of the four German words is used as (part of) an insult: “dumme Pute” is a very derogatory term for an unintelligent female.
P.P.S. The German article noted that the English term “Turkey” was originally used for what is now called “guinea hen” (in English), and that when the other bird showed up, the same term was also applied to it. It also mentioned “Indian” or “Calcutta chicken” as being used in French (are you still reading this, Olivier?)
P.P.P.S. Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin wanting the turkey to be the American emblem (instead of the eagle); if that had actually happened, Armstrong would have been able to exclaim, “The Turkey has landed!“
“Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin…” Heh, “canard” — I see what you did there.
For the record, it’s not quite a canard, just, like reports of Mark Twain’s death, greatly exaggerated:
http://www.greatseal.com/symbols/turkey.html
Kilby, “Turkey” would gave been an unfortunate name for the LEM, since I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly.
Kind of a geezer joke, but “there’s a difference when your boss say, ‘let’s talk turkey’ or ‘let’s talk, turkey.”
[Re: P.P.P.S. Then there is the old canard about Benjamin Franklin wanting the turkey to be the American emblem (instead of the eagle); if that had actually happened, Armstrong would have been able to exclaim, “The Turkey has landed!“
Re: Kilby, “Turkey” would gave been an unfortunate name for the LEM, since I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly. ]
…
But if the turkey had been our national emblem in stead of the eagle, then wouldn’t the roles have been reversed, with “eagle” meaning a flop?
@ CIDU Bill – “…I have it on good authority that turkeys can’t fly…”
Those domesticated lardballs bear a fleeting similarity to lead balloons, but wild birds are another matter:
And would golfers celebrate a turkey as even better than a birdie?
I prefer the name “gobbler.”
@ Mitch4 – A “birdie” is one under par, and an “eagle” is two under par. Scoring three under par is even rarer than a hole-in-one, since it can only happen with the second shot on a par-5 hole, and is called an “albatross“.
Kilby, yes, I was trying to follow suit from previous comments about “what if ‘turkey’ replaced ‘eagle’?”.
But the three-under “albatross” in golf was indeed a pleasing surprise!
And to pursue “albatross” into music, we have first an instrumental from blues-era Fleetwood Mac with some excellent covers. And then .. no, it would take more than one more stroke to reach composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor.
And pursuing ‘albatross’ into . . .
(I didn’t realize that ‘A Wish for Wings That Work’ – which we were discussing previously somewhere – is on YouTube (of course it is) . . .
For “turkey” being an insult — domestic turkeys have a reputation as being particularly dumb. The story goes that they have been known to look up in the rain, open their mouths, and drown. I doubt it’s actually true, but that’s the reputation.
Wild turkeys, on the other hand, are smart and vicious. Wild turkeys are a reminder that therapod dinosaurs never went extinct.and would do perfectly fine if you time-traveled them back to the Jurassic.
We had a ‘gang’ of ’em come almost to the front door of the house 12/23/17 – I think there were 20 or so. They did look kind of – not exactly vicious but I sure didn’t want to be out there with ’em!
(Yes, we have all sorts of wildlife come visit – we live in a conservancy area, right next to a nature preserve. Makes for interesting times . . . coyotes, a herd of deer living in the high grass next door and eating the flowers in my hanging baskets [I quickly learned what plants are deer-resistant] and attempting to eat an artificial holiday wreath, supposed bobcat sightings, kids destroying the golf course, [supposed] bear & cubs sighting [altho it being Fourth of July, I put that ‘sighting’ down to Jack Daniels], alligators [‘Where there’s water, there’re alligators”], turkeys in trees who’ve obviously NOT watched the WCRP episode and DO fly, as well as limpkins, ibises, cranes, herons and endangered wood storks.)
Mmm…theropod with cranberry sauce and stuffing….
Kilby — I’m not a golfer and so this is perhaps a stupid question, but is there some rule that no hole on a gold course can be higher than par four? (Given the popularity of extreme sports, I’d expect some folks to set up Extreme Golf Courses with much more difficult holes (“par seventeen, and that’s only if you get your chip shot over the alligator moat….”).
Englebrecht, the famed Dward Surrealist Boxer (he specializes in boxing grandfather clocks, but also has other sportsoid skills) starred in a story about a golf course that covered the entire earth, but I don’t recall if it was one of the original stories by Maurice Richardson or one of the (also very good) more recent patiches by Rhys Hughes.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1681402.The_Exploits_of_Engelbrecht
@ Shrug – Standard golf holes are either par 3, 4, or 5. I once heard of par 6 holes for women, but that may be antiquated, and certainly does not apply to professional courses. A typical 18-hole course has something like ten par-4s, four par-3s, and four par-5s. Variations abound, but the total is usually 72, sometimes 71, or 70.
‘. . . and that’s only if you get your chip shot over the alligator moat….”.
Alligator moats/ponds are ‘par for the course’ here in FL, I’ve found out. Literally.
P.S. Speaking of “albatross” (I wanted to link to the video but could not find a URL that worked well from here).
this one?
Link to a list of covers. Fleetwood original is in embedded video.
https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/29521
The cover I particularly like doesn’t seem to be listed, an ad hoc Bay Area group that back Connie Champagne (tho ofc she doesn’t sing on this instrumental track).
And turkeywork needlework has nothing to do with bird – but probably does come from the country as it like a rug.
Turkey as a country did not exist until after WWI in 1923. There were Turks before that, but the area they lived in covered a huge swath of the middle east and Asia. Huns (as in Attilia, not the Germans) were considered to be Turks.
So while the turkey may have been named after the Turks – it was named long before there was a country called Turkey.
That should actually be that turkeywork probably comes from the middle east area as it is like a rug.
There was a musical style or form called “Turkish March” in Classical/Romantic era European music. Mozart has a famous one, and one of my favorite bits within the finale (“Ode to Joy”) of Beethoven’s Ninth is the Turkish March section right by the tenor solo.
AFAIK, this so-called Turkish style did not have really genuine roots in the music of Asia Minor or the Turks as a people, but reflected what earlier European composers had written to convey an impression of Orientalism. But I have not read up on it recently, so perhaps corrections are in order.