Turkey - the Word of the Week

 I've mentioned Word & Song before — here's my review. I was so surprised by what Anthony Esolen said about turkeys being in a Shakespeare play 20 years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock that I wanted to share this part. Read it all here.

... there’s our Word of the Week, turkey, in a play [Twelfth Night] that was written almost twenty years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, and before they celebrated a late-autumn Thanksgiving with great roasted turkeys! Is it the same bird? Where did it come from? Why is it called a turkey?

As best we can figure, it was the same bird or close to it, brought into Europe and Asia by Spanish traders. It quickly became a favorite — after all, you’d much prefer a big fat turkey to a skinny goose or stork. But it got to England by a circuitous route: from India, where the Spanish took it, and Madagascar, and thence to the country called Turkey, after the people, the Turks, who ruled there. The Turks themselves called the bird hindi, meaning that it came from India, and that’s also why in French it was called poulet d’Inde, Indian chicken — giving us modern French dindon. In Italy, they call it tacchino, probably imitating a tak-tak-tak gobble. If you think that’s odd, in Persia you may call it either korus e-hendi, Indian chicken, or booghalamoon — again, for the gobble. In any case, if you were living in London in Shakespeare’s time, you might well have the popular turkey as your Christmas feast.

So when the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts, imagine their surprise when they saw wild turkeys galumphing about, fattened on local walnuts and beech nuts and hazels and apples! They’d have known from experience what to do with those birds. We’ve got flocks of them where we live now, in New Hampshire, and one winter’s day they gathered, about two dozen, around a crabapple tree in the neighbor’s yard, craning their necks and hopping from the ground to snatch the fruits, yes, hopping, because they were too heavy for the branches, especially the toms.