Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Holy Shit, Turkeys!

Turkeys.

I'm gonna make this short because I have been distracted recently by the birth of my newest niece. That guy up above, as you probably know, is a Turkey. Despite being thoroughly American, he's named after Turkey the country. The reasoning behind this is that it sounds exotic, and the European explorers who found him may have still been under the impression that America was part of Asia.

Strangely enough, many other languages use country names for the turkey as well. In actual Turkey, they call it a "Hindi," suggesting that it's from India. That's surprisingly common. France, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, and several other countries also call it some variation of "India." In actual India, they call it a Peru.

In Cambodia, they call it a French Chicken. In Arabic, it's called either a Roman Chicken or an Ethiopian Chicken. In Malaysia, it's a Dutch Chicken.

Bottom line: Turkeys are weird, people's names for Turkeys are weirder, and Happy Thanksgiving.

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