How Turkey the Bird Was Named After Turkey the Nation

choi

(1) turkey/Turkey. Online Etymology Dictionary, undated.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=turkey

My comment: The next does not supply a timeline, so I, after reading it, was under the impression Pilgrims brought the bird back to England and got confused. Turns out Spaniards brought it to Europe.


(2) Mark Forsyth, The Turkey’s Turkey Connection. New York Times, Nov 28, 2013 (op-ed).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/2 ... key-connection.html

Note:
(a) “Once upon a time, English mealtimes were miserable things. There were no potatoes, no cigars and definitely no turkey. Then people began to import a strange, exotic bird. Its scientific name was Numida meleagris; its normal name now is the helmeted guinea fowl, because it’s got this weird bony protuberance on its forehead that looks a bit like a helmet. It came all the way from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, but the English didn’t know that.”
(i) Potato, tobacco and turkey were all native to the Americas.
(ii) See photos in
Helmeted Guineafowl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmeted_Guineafowl
(Numida meleagris; It breeds in Africa, mainly south of the Sahara; section 1 Taxonomy)

(b) For “talk turkey,” see talk (v)
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=talk
(“To talk turkey is from 1824, supposedly from an elaborate joke about a swindled Indian”)
(c) cold turkey
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cold+turkey
(“‘without preparation,’ 1910; narrower sense of ‘withdrawal from an addictive substance’ (originally heroin) first recorded 1921. Cold turkey is a food that requires little preparation, so "to quit like cold turkey" is to do so suddenly and without preparation”)
(d) cold turkey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_turkey
(sectional heading Etymology)