Pylimitics

It’s nowhere near November or Thanksgiving, so we have plenty of time to consider the word “turkey.” The first thing to consider is that the bird has that name because of a mistake. The North American species was confused with a bird called a “guinea fowl,” and those were thought to be from Turkey. Two mistakes, actually; turkeys are not related to guinea fowls (although they look a bit similar), and guinea fowls are from Africa, not Asia, where you can find Turkey.

But the name of the bird itself is only one of the ways we use the word turkey. It started in the 1800s when “talk turkey” appeared. It originally meant using fancy language, but nowadays it means to speak frankly. In the 1800s there was also the expression “walk turkey,” which meant strutting. 

Using the term “turkey day” for Thanksgiving was first recorded in the Hartford Courant newspaper in 1870: “To-morrow is turkey day, gobbler’s day, or the day when the gobbler is gobbled.”

“Cold turkey” means both “truth” as well as “sudden withdrawal,” as from an addictive drug. That expression dates to the early 20th century.

A “turkey” can also be a show (either a play or a movie) that fails. In 1927 this appeared in Vanity Fair: “‘A Turkey’ is a third rate production.”

In the 1950s, “turkey” came to mean a person who was incompetent or inept.

As to why the term “turkey” generally has negative connotations, nobody knows. It didn’t start out that way; the first metaphorical uses of “turkey” were either neutral or positive. For some reason the 20th century was not a very good one for turkey. How turkeys themselves feel about it has not been explored.