Holy Cow!

by Boze Hadleigh

  Turkey

  Native to North America, for thousands of years this was a primary food source for inhabitants and, later, colonizers. Turkeys were introduced to Europe in the 1500s by Spaniards who “discovered” them in Mexico, where today’s word for turkey is via the Aztecs, while in Spain another word is used. Cows, pigs, and horses were introduced to the Americas by the conquistadores.

  Ben Franklin argued strongly for adopting the turkey as the United States’ national bird. However, the eagle—a bird of prey and symbol of conquest since at least the Roman empire—got the nod. (India’s national bird is the stunning peacock, and peacock butterflies likewise boast prominent “eyes.”)

  The name “turkey” comes from the dissimilar guineafowl, which was exported to Europe through Turkey and usually called a Turkey hen or Turkey cock. North American colonists somehow confused the birds and called the native after the Mideastern nation from which neither bird came.

  Although most expressions involving turkey are negative, there is a positive one: in bowling, achieving three strikes in a row is called a turkey. The term may have originated because of holiday-time tournaments in which competitors bowling three strikes against the heavier pins—typically four pounds—won a live turkey.

  Turkey Shoot to Turkey Vultures

  The plight of the vulnerable turkey is invoked in this first North American term referring to a situation, particularly in war, wherein the aggressor has a tremendous advantage and the outcome is a virtually foregone conclusion.

  A turkey oak is a southern European oak with a domed fanning crown and acorn cups featuring feather-like out-pointing long scales.

  The turkey trot, not likely to be confused with the less jolly foxtrot, was a popular 20th-century ballroom dance performed to ragtime music.

  The turkey vulture is easily the most common vulture in North America, found in Canada, all 50 US states and Mexico. It’s often mistakenly called a buzzard, a hawk-like bird of prey whose name is from the Latin for falcon. Like other vultures, it doesn’t circle soon-to-be-dead prey. Rather, it conserves energy by soaring in circles, sometimes for hours, on thermals—updrafts of warm rising air—while flapping its wings as little as possible. (Yet again, movies, TV, and cartoons often ignore the truth for dramatic effect and stereotyping, which is a form of shorthand.)

  A vulture won’t land until it’s certain its intended meal is dead and there’s minimal competition from land creatures or other birds; vultures are basically passive. A prime means of defending themselves is projectile vomiting, up to ten feet’s worth of malodorous carrion aimed at a soon-to-be-disgusted enemy.

  Talking Turkey

  Radical shifts of meaning in words are frequently more explainable than in phrases. In the late 1700s to talk turkey meant to chat (short for chatter, often applied to birds and monkeys). Conversely, to “not say turkey” or “not say pea-turkey” meant not to talk at all, to keep silent.

  Why turkeys were associated with speech is a mystery, though their gobbling reminded some people of conversation. Also, turkeys are sociable birds that congregate in flocks, the males sometimes courting in pairs(!). Because turkeys were so abundant, so easy to kill, and so delicious to eat, it was sometimes said that most conversations between the Pilgrims and Native Americans involved “talking about turkey.”

  It’s also been reported that turkey hunters could attract a bird’s attention by making gobble-gobble sounds, imitating the poor turkey, which answered back and alerted its foe to its presence.

  Regardless, by the early 20th century, to talk turkey had shifted from casual conversation to discussing cold, hard facts. Today it often has a business connotation, as in “Call my attorney when you’re ready to talk turkey.”

  The Parson’s Nose

  The fleshy bump on the end of a dressed turkey is called a pygostyle—chickens, ducks, and geese also have one—covering the join where the avian spine and tail feathers attach. The pygostyle’s fatted appearance is due to oil glands a bird uses when preening. To somebody with an influence on the English language, this protuberance resembled a snooty up-turned nose and so, depending whom one preferred to insult, it was called the parson’s nose, pope’s nose, or sultan’s nose. The phrase goes back to the Middle Ages, when religion ruled the roost.

  A roost isn’t just where birds settle to rest at night, it’s also where bats settle to rest in the day.

  Going Cold Turkey

  At first, one didn’t do something cold turkey, one talked cold turkey (related to “talking turkey”). As in a 1922 letter by poet Carl Sandburg: “I’m going to talk cold turkey with booksellers.”

  Cold turkey was also a slangy adverb-equivalent for suddenly. Example: “I made one mistake, then found myself out of a job cold turkey.”

  By the 1930s cold turkey was addict slang for sudden narcotics withdrawal, and was listed as such in a 1936 article in American Speech. The skin of someone withdrawing from drugs is said to be pale, clammy, and prone to goose bumps, like the skin of a plucked turkey (but not a plucked goose?). Author William Burroughs, no stranger to substance abuse, observed in Junkie (1953) that one’s skin during withdrawal looks like a turkey’s that’s been plucked, cooked, and left out to cool.

  Or the expression may hark back to 1910, when comparison was made between a cold turkey meal requiring minimal preparation and withdrawing from drug use with no preparation. As the century dragged on, cold turkey became most closely associated with quitting smoking (and was the title of a 1971 Dick Van Dyke movie in which an entire town gives up smoking).

  Nowadays cold turkey may also refer to sudden relinquishing of less hazardous habits like cheesecake, ice cream, cookies, or chocolate!

  N.B. Yes, Latin—nota bene, note well: Although dark chocolate is healthier for humans than milk chocolate, it’s often lethal for small dogs, due to the ingredient theobromine, which ironically means (from the Greek) food of the gods. Caveat emptor.

  The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

  To kill the goose that lays the golden egg is to be self-destructively greedy and shortsighted. In 1484 William Caxton translated Aesop’s famous fable in which an uneducated peasant discovers a goose that lays golden eggs. One golden egg fills the man with impatient greed, so he kills the animal to retrieve her remaining eggs. The moral is to not be carried away by greed and to consider the long- rather than the short-term.

  Nest Egg

  Today a nest egg is typically someone’s savings or a sum set aside for the future, but originally it meant something to add to, specifically, an inducement. Before corporate farming, when hens could roam about and lay their eggs in nests, people still sought greater productivity. To encourage it, a farmer might put a porcelain or pottery egg, called a nest egg, into the nest. It often worked. Similarly, a small gift of money presented to someone as a “nest egg” was meant to encourage them to add to it. One example popular in the prospering years after World War II was to give a child a piggy bank containing some—not too many—pleasingly noisy coins.

  Speaking of money, a dollarbird is an Australasian roller with a distinctive white coin-like mark on its wing. A roller is a brightly colored crow-sized bird, mostly blue, with a typically tumbling display flight. It’s also a type of canary with a trilling sound and a breed of tumbler pigeon.

  Bird’s Nest Soup

  In Hong Kong a bowl of bird’s nest soup can be had for the equivalent of $30 to $100. Sound expensive? To buy bird nest by the kilo costs about $2,500. But the nests of swiftlets, small swifts native to South Asia and Australasia, aren’t the usual avian home built of twigs. Rather, swiftlets, thanks to oversized salivary glands, fabricate their nests with interwoven strings of gluey saliva that act like cement but which, when dissolved in water, have a gelatinous texture. Bird’s nest soup has been a Chinese delicacy for over 400 years and remains popular with those who can afford it. Predictably, it’s reputed to have medicinal and aphrodisiacal qualities.

  A Wild Goose Chase

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p; This expression dates back to 16th-century England and the bizarre beginnings of horse racing. To wit, a lead horse would run off in whatever direction the rider chose. After a delay, a second horse and rider would pursue, followed at regular intervals by more of same. But since none of the subsequent riders knew what route the first horse and rider had taken, they dispersed variously, which reminded somebody of the assorted directions taken by wild geese flocking after their leader.

  The English associated the phrase with horse racing until Shakespeare changed the meaning to fruitless pursuit. In Romeo and Juliet (1597) Mercutio declares, “Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose Chase, I am done.”

  Today a wild goose chase is a fruitless pursuit or an empty errand or process one is sent on by a devious sender to buy him time (especially in the movies).

  Goosestep

  What has the notorious goosestep to do with a goose? After all, geese bend their (backward-pointing) knees when they walk. Once again, the English name wasn’t the original when the step was introduced into the army of militaristic Prussia (northern Germany) in the mid 1700s. It was called Stechschritt, stabbing step. Somebody thought the marching step resembled that of a goose, but the German term Gaensemarch, or goose march, couldn’t be used, as it already meant people, especially children, walking in single file—like goslings after their mother. In the early 1800s Britain began calling it the goosestep. When the French named it, it was pas de l’oie (goosestep). Italians called it passo Romano (Roman step).

  The aggressive step, with legs raised high and knees unbent, was meant to intimidate and give an impression of extreme uniformity—a definition of fascism; the step became indelibly associated in the 1920s with Mussolini’s Fascists and in the ’30s with Hitler’s Nazis.

  Gooseflesh

  It’s called gooseflesh, gooseskin, goosebumps, and goose pimples—also cutis anserina, the latter word the adjective pertaining to geese. Intense cold or extreme fear and excitement, including sexual pleasure or awe, can cause involuntary bumps at the base of human body hairs. A pertinent but barely known word is horripilation, the erection of hairs on the skin due to those usually unexpected and strong emotions. The term comes from the Latin for horrible and hair.

  A classic musical composition is “Capriccio Espagnol.” A capriccio is a lively piece of music, but was also a 17th-century name for a fantasy painting that may have included elements of horror. Related to the word caprice, which used to have darker connotations, it’s Italian from capo, head, and riccio, hedgehog, referring to that animal’s spiny hair standing frightfully on end.

  Human gooseflesh may be a vestigial response—the rising of hair to make the body seem larger and more formidable to an adversary. This occurs in many mammals, including cats and sea otters when they see sharks. As for geese, their feathers grow from stores in their skin that look like human hair follicles; when a goose’s feathers are plucked, its skin has protrusions where the feathers were—ergo, goose bumps. This phenomenon, seen in various other birds, is also known as arasing, piloerection, and the pilomotor reflex (from pilus, Latin for hair; pelo means hair in Spanish, for instance).

  Non-Goose

  Never heard of goosefoot? It’s an edible plant whose divided leaves supposedly resemble a goose’s foot. Known as very nutritious in the Midwest and increasingly popular in salads everywhere, the plural is goosefoots. But you already know the most famous member of the goosefoot family: spinach.

  Goosegrass is a widespread plant related to bedstraws (previously used to stuff mattresses).

  Gooseberry is an edible round berry, usually reddish or yellowish-green, with a thin, translucent, fuzzy skin. A British name for it is goosegog.

  In Britain a gooseberry is also a third wheel, a third person whom two people would rather shed to be alone together. To play gooseberry is to be a chaperone, for the gooseberry is a traditional symbol of anticipation. When children asked where babies came from, parents often said they were found underneath a gooseberry bush, an explanation that endured into the 1920s.

  A gooseneck is a pipe or support curved like a goose’s neck.

  A goose egg is North American slang for a zero score in a game.

  A goosefish is a North American bottom-dwelling anglerfish.

  A goose barnacle is a stalked barnacle that hangs from floating objects in water and catches passing food with its feathery legs.

  A silly goose is somebody foolish or hopeless, and a gone goose (or gone gosling) is someone for whom there’s no hope, for example, “He hasn’t kept his grades up—he’s a gone goose for entering Harvard.”

  Never heard of goose-dirt shoes? They’re seldom mentioned today, but on the Internet there’s a whole photographic array of the casual, sometimes colorful footwear.

  Geese. . .

  “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” (a male goose), now a retort to the double standard, was originally a 17th-century cooking term meaning female geese and ganders didn’t have to be cooked differently or separately (duh). A gannet, a big seabird that catches fish by plunge-diving, is linguistically related to gander, which was criminal slang; gannet is current British slang for a greedy individual. (To take or have a gander is to take a look, said to reflect anserine curiosity.)

  A goose is also a tailor’s smoothing iron.

  To goose someone is to poke them. (Q: If you poke a goose, are you giving it a person?) It originally meant to poke someone in the bottom, as geese are wont to do. Though sociable amongst themselves, geese frequently bite people, their beaks reaching about the height of a person’s bottom. To give someone a goose now means to poke or elbow them anywhere, often in the side.

  “Gay as a goose” is mostly explained by alliteration. Over 100 animal species also practice homosexuality; however, it’s more prevalent in higher animals, specifically mammals, than birds—notwithstanding the lesbian seagulls made famous in song by Engelbert Humperdinck. Though the 20th-century phrase usually referred to homosexuality, some sources say it referred to merry, cheerful geese. If so, again alliteration played a substantial role.

  To cook someone’s goose is to dramatically deal an opponent a crushing blow. To cook one’s goose is to do something that backfires on one. The former expression is said to date back to the Middle Ages, when an army prepared to attack a confidently prosperous town whose leaders hung a goose outside the city gate as a sign of contempt. The affronted army burned down the town and “cooked its goose.”

  A goshawk is a short-winged hawk whose Olde English name meant goose hawk.

  Somebody unable to say boo to a goose is excessively shy or timid.

  Mother Goose was and is the archetypal teller of children’s nursery rhymes. She’s sometimes depicted as a goose, sometimes as a human wearing a Welsh hat that looks witch-y but is offset by her friendly expression.

  FYI, geese mate for life and grieve at a mate’s loss. If a goose becomes sick or is wounded in flight, two geese will leave the formation to escort and protect the goose, remaining with it until it dies or is able to fly on its own.

  Cuckold and Cuckoo

  Cuckold, a man whose wife cheats on him, comes from cuckoo, a bird that lays her eggs in another bird’s nest. Why would she do such a cuckoo thing?

  First, cuckoo was coined by the 1200s, the name imitative of the bird’s call. By the 1500s the word could describe a foolish person, as people at the time were unaware that the she-cuckoo is deviously clever rather than foolish. She chooses another bird’s eggs that resemble her own, then removes a few from the foreign nest so the host bird won’t push the cuckoo’s eggs out.

  By the 13th century cuckold referred to a man with an unfaithful wife, for in addition to the female cuckoo’s oviparous habits, she often has more than one mate and doesn’t settle down to one single nest (the phrase “free as a bird” comes to mind).

  The cuckold was said—particularly in Mediterranean cultures—to “wear the horns,” referencing not birds, but stags, who lock horns in battle. T
he defeated male cedes his mate to the victor. The sign of the horn, made with the second and fifth fingers, is still used in many countries, and in Sicily it’s a grave insult to call a man a cuckold.

  By the early 1900s and especially in the United States, cuckoo came to mean somebody crazy. In keeping with the trend to shorter words, “kook” emerged from cuckoo in the late 1950s but like its adjective kooky, had a softer meaning: somebody offbeat or colorful, not necessarily nuts.

  Cuckoos

  Cuckoo bees are parasitic (not all bees work hard), laying their eggs in the nest of another sort of bee, while cuckoo wasps lay theirs in nests of other wasps or bees.

  The cuckooflower has pale lilac flowers that bloom in spring, when the male cuckoo’s distinctive, far-carrying two-note call is first heard. “The Dance of the Cuckoos” was the signature tune of the immortal movie comedy team Laurel and Hardy.

  A cuckoo pint is a widespread wild arum with a green or purple spadix and red berries. It was formerly called a cuckoo-pintle (sic), from Olde English pintel (sic), or penis, via the shape of the spadix. (How many people know that penis is Latin for tail?)

  Cuckoo spit is a pale froth extruded onto leaves and plant stems by the larvae of froghoppers.

  And who hasn’t heard a cuckoo clock?

  Crazy as a Loon?

  The word lunatic descends from the Latin luna, moon, for many ancient peoples held that overexposure to moonlight caused madness. Loony means silly or mad, someone who perhaps belongs in a loony bin. Loony is also slang for the Canadian dollar coin, after the avian loon depicted on it. The bird’s name is from Scandinavian lom, clumsy. The Olde English word loun, meaning madman or clown, evolved into the Scottish loon, a simpleton or crazy person.