Friday 26 December 2008

Why "Turkey"?

No, not “Why do we eat it at Christmas?”, although the suggestion that this was “traditional” always baffled my father, who after 1967 spent no Christmas in this country until 1981. He was adamant that it had become the custom here, rather than in America, only in the intervening years, and that the traditional Christmas dish here was goose.

No, my question is why we call this bird a turkey, why the French word for it is dinde (i.e., d’Inde, from India) and why (although I’d have to check) the word in other Romance languages is presumably similar, when everyone has always known that turkeys came originally from the Americas? Any ideas?

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