Turkey season

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Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







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