Lifestyle
How the turkey trotted its way onto our Thanksgiving tables — and into our lexicon
One of the two national Thanksgiving turkeys, Waddle and Gobble, which were presented to journalists in the Willard Room of the Willard InterContinental on November 24, 2025 in Washington, DC., for the 78th annual Turkey Pardoning at the White House.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In the English language, the turkey gets kind of a tough break.
Talking turkey requires serious honesty and speaking harsh truths. Going cold turkey is, often, an onerous way of quitting something completely and suddenly. Being a turkey is a rude zinger thrown at movie and theatrical flops, as well as unpleasant, failure-prone people.
Yet, in the culinary world, the turkey looms large, particularly during November. This year, Americans are expected to eat about 30 million of them on Thanksgiving day, according to the National Turkey Federation. It’s a fitting legacy for a bird that’s been a fixture of holiday meals ever since it was first brought across the Atlantic to Europe by colonists.
But for all its cultural ubiquity, much of the turkey’s early history is shrouded in uncertainty, historians and etymologists say. That’s particularly true of how the bird got its name.
“‘Turkey’ is a very confusing, confusing name,” says Anatoly Liberman, a linguist and etymologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
So in this week’s installment of “Word of the Week,” we trace the origins of that confusing name — all the way back to pre-Columbian Mexico.
A case of mistaken identity
The species of Thanksgiving turkey that we know today, meleagris gallopavo, was domesticated in the Americas centuries before the arrival of Europeans, according to food historian Andrew F. Smith’s book The Turkey: An American Story. They were found in what’s now Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, though the exact details of who domesticated the birds and when aren’t quite clear, Smith writes. And, thanks to fairly shoddy record-keeping, it also isn’t quite clear which European explorers can be credited with bringing turkeys back home with them.
But by the 1520s, the birds were being raised in Spain and served on the dinner tables of the upper-class, Smith writes. Over the decades, farmers across the continent began to raise them, too.
From there, though, the American bird became a victim of mistaken identity, according to lexicographer Erin McKean. Prior to meleagris gallopavo‘s arrival, the Europeans already had a bird they called the turkey: the African guinea fowl. The two game birds look similar and were ending up on people’s dinner tables in basically the same way, McKean says.
A guinea fowl is seen in January 2020 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to the arrival of meleagris gallopavo, the African guinea fowl was the bird that Europeans called a “turkey.”
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Warren Little/Getty Images
“I bet they look a lot more similar when they’re denuded of their feathers, roasted and on a plate,” she says.
As a result, meleagris gallopavo got stuck with the name “turkey,” too.
But the American turkeys began to eclipse the popularity of their African doppelgangers, Smith writes. And they began showing up in historical documents; in 1550s Venice, for example, they were subject to sumptuary laws, which governed which members of society had access to particular luxuries, McKean says.
“So only certain people were allowed to eat turkey at that point,” she says.
One thing that’s not clear in the historical documents, though, is how the term “turkey” came to apply to guinea fowls in the first place. Smith writes that Europeans often added the word “turkey” onto items that were foreign and strange, like “turkey corn” from the Americas. McKean says that the name is thought to have come from the guinea fowl being brought by traders into Europe through the Turkish region.
But the word’s origin isn’t settled fact, she says. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to know.”
For his part, Liberman says that it’s a myth that the bird has anything to do with the country of Turkey.
“The Europeans knew nothing about [the turkey’s] origin and invented all kinds of names. They were not sure where the bird came from and ascribed its origin to all kinds of foreign lands,” he says.
In that sense, the bird is in good company: Liberman says that the origins of most bird names are mysterious. “Some are entirely fanciful, and some are the product of confusion,” he says.
Back to the Americas, and into the English lexicon
Over the decades, the English grew particularly fond of turkeys, which became a central part of celebrations like Christmas, Smith writes in The Turkey. So when English colonists came to North America and created settlements like Jamestown in the early 17th century, they brought their beloved domesticated turkeys along with them.
Crowds buying their Christmas turkeys at the Caledonian Market, London.
John Warwick Brooke/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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John Warwick Brooke/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The rest is history. Over the next two centuries, colonists’ celebrations of thanksgiving for good harvests and military victories became tradition, Smith writes. And by the time President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be a national holiday in 1863, turkeys were a mainstay of those meals.
Ever since, the turkey has remained on Thanksgiving tables — and in our colloquialisms, though they’ve continued to evolve.
Take “cold turkey,” for example. Now, the phrase is often associated with quitting an addiction – but that wasn’t the case when the first uses of the idiom started popping up in the late 19th century, according to Dave Wilton, the editor of WordOrigins.org. It simply meant that something was done quickly, he says, in reference to the fact that cold turkey is a dish that requires no preparation.
The meaning of “talking turkey” has also evolved, he says, from being “social” and ” agreeable” in the early 19th century to talking plainly and frankly around the beginning of the 20th.
Calling someone a “turkey” as an insult comes from theatrical slang, he says. Starting in the late 1800s, second-rate thespians were deemed “turkey actors”. It’s also come to describe box office failures.
Why all the negativity? McKean has a theory: “It’s an ugly bird that struts like a peacock without the beautiful feathers to justify showing off.” (Ouch.)
But it’s a word that has had staying power, despite the fact that it’s likely a misnomer in the first place.
“One thing we can’t lose sight of is that turkey is pretty much a fun word to say,” McKean says.
At the very least, it’s catchier than meleagris gallopavo.
Dr. John Henry Cook III hadn’t meant to appear bare-chested on Sylvia Rosemarie Auton’s iPhone when he called her for a chat last July. It was 7:45 a.m., and Cook, who was home alone with his dog in Leesburg, Va., was having trouble facing the day.
“I was lying in the bed my wife had died in,” he said. “I was feeling busted by sorrow, and I just wanted to talk to Sylvia.” An accidental push of the FaceTime button sent more than his voice through the ether.
Auton, who was visiting her daughter at the time in Phoenix, Md., was taken aback.
“He said, ‘Good morning, Love,’” she recalled. “I was stunned.” She was equally stunned a day later when, hours after their first kiss, he proposed.
Auton, 85, and Cook, 90, first met in May 2011, when Auton and her late husband, Forrest Hanvey, became patients at Cook’s concierge medical practice in Leesburg. Hanvey, who died in 2024, had known Cook since the 1950s, when both were midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. A friendly relationship between the former classmates soon extended to their wives, Auton and Agnes diZerega Cook, whom friends knew as Di.
Both couples would routinely see each other at U.S.N.A. alumni events, and after Cook retired from medicine in 2017, they met up occasionally for group lunches with Navy friends.
“I got to know Di, who was a wonderful watercolor artist and wonderful person,” Auton said. When Di died in April 2025 of cardiac arrest, the friendship between the two surviving spouses deepened.
Auton is an author and educator. Before she moved to Fairfax, Va., in 1969 with her first husband, a nuclear physicist named David Auton, she lived in Chicago, where she grew up. Her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and master’s in mathematics education are from the University of Chicago. Her doctorate in mathematics education and statistics is from the University of Maryland.
Auton and David, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2003, raised a daughter, Alyson Russo, now an anesthesiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the mother of Auton’s two grandsons, ages 6 and 2. The Autons also had a son, Timothy Lee, who died in 2014.
Auton taught in Chicago classrooms before she was promoted to her first position in educational leadership in the late 1970s. In 2005, she retired as director of staff development for Fairfax County Public Schools.
Auton now teaches personal finance classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, part of George Mason University. She also advises women on beginner stock market and investment strategies.
Her advice extends to navigating romance and relationships, too. “The Last Embrace: Caregiving for a Beloved Spouse,” a self-published 2025 book, was written after she spent a protracted period caring for Hanvey, who died after a fall at home in Fairfax Station. “The Wondrous Embrace: Finding Love in the Sunset Years,” also self-published in 2025, is meant to inspire hope among older people who may be souring on the chances of finding love.
Auton met Hanvey when she was well into her 60s and he was 70 in January 2005. They married the same year, in September. “One thing I do not want is for anyone to feel discouraged,” when it comes to love or otherwise, she said.
Before Cook earned his medical degree from Yale, he was a Polaris submarine commander in the U.S. Navy. During the Cold War, he served in nuclear submarines. He married Di in 1957, the day after he graduated from the Naval Academy.
Military service had been a Cook family legacy. His father was a Marine first lieutenant; he was born at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. With Di, he had a daughter, Elizabeth, and two sons, John and Harrison. His five grandchildren range in age from 24 to 30.
When Hanvey was declining in 2024, Auton wasn’t always certain she understood his needs. In those moments, she would ask Hanvey if he wanted to talk with someone else. “Invariably, it would be, ‘I want to talk with Jack,’” she said. Cook picked up the phone every time.
On May 17, 2025, Cook held a memorial for Di at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Leesburg, where they had married almost 70 years earlier. Soon after she died, Auton sent the family a condolence card and tucked a printout of the 1934 poem “Immortality,” by Clare Harner, inside. “I thought it might comfort Jack,” she said.
At the memorial, he told her how much he liked it. But Auton knew his grief was of a depth poetry could do little to assuage. “I saw the pain he was in,” she said.
Less than two weeks later, she was surprised when he texted her a handwritten poem. “He had taken the original poem I sent him and created a poem as if Di were reading it to him,” she said. “I was so taken with that I sent a poem back to him as though Forrest were writing to me.” Both poems touched on how they shouldn’t feel alone, how their spouses’ spirits wouldn’t leave them.
Auton was planning a June 2025 celebration of life for Hanvey at the time. “Jack had done such a wonderful job with Di’s, I asked him if he would come over and look at my ideas,” she said. Over lunch, the effects of his loss were as apparent as they had been at the memorial for Di.
“He was still zombielike with grief,” she said. Compassion and a sense of hopefulness about helping him through his pain led to a shift toward tender new feelings.
On June 29, as Cook was leaving the celebration of life for Hanvey, he bent down to hug her and whispered “I love you” in her ear. “What was astonishing is that, without a moment of hesitation, I responded ‘I love you, too,’” she said.
The next morning, he sent her a text message: “Bravo Zulu,” a Navy term for “well done.” She asked herself if his declaration of love at the service meant little more than appreciation for the celebration honoring his friend.
They didn’t speak again until July 11, when Auton was preparing to get in the shower at her daughter’s house and Cook was shirtless and in bed. Auton checked that only her face was visible when she answered the early morning call. They hung up with a plan to meet for lunch the next day, at Auton’s house in Fairfax Station.
“At 1 o’clock, there he was, holding a mini orchid plant” as a gift, she said. “He stepped into the foyer, stepped into my arms and gave me a long, deep kiss.” Two hours later, on a deck overlooking a lake on the property, he proposed.
At the memorial for Hanvey, Cook’s feelings for Auton had taken him by surprise. “When you’ve been in a long-term, loving marriage, you always have your feelers out” for your spouse, he said. When the spouse dies, “those feelers that had been intertwined wither away.” For Cook, maintaining hope that they would one day regenerate and intertwine with someone else had been a challenge.
But “the moment I kissed her, it’s almost like I put the key in the lock,” he said. “My life started again.”
On May 9, Cook and Auton married at St. James’ Episcopal Church. Rev. Chad Martin officiated a traditional Christian ceremony for 90 guests.
Auton wore a dusty rose ankle-length dress from her closet — the same dress she had worn to marry Hanvey. “It brought back loving memories,” she said. Cook wore a dark gray suit with a multicolored tie and his trademark red socks. Both had entered the church from a side door, then sat in chairs arranged in front of the altar, standing only to say their vows.
“At our age, stability is an issue,” Auton said. “I wobble well, but I didn’t want to wobble up a long aisle.”
After a kiss to mark the start of their married life and a careful recess to the church parish for a buffet lunch, they reflected on the resilience of the heart.
“Even if the days ahead are few, both of us would like others to have hope for the future,” Auton said. Since he and Auton fell in love, Cook said, “life has been delightful.”
“Beauty and music surround us all,” he added. “If you listen for it, you’ll hear it. If you don’t, you’ll miss it.”
On This Day
When May 9, 2026
Where St. James’ Episcopal Church, Leesburg, Va.
Church Finest The reception in the church parish was catered by Tuscarora Mill, a local restaurant whose owner Cook has known for years. On the menu were prime rib and roast chicken. The lively spring décor, including bright florals, pink napkins and white tablecloths, had been set up by the church sexton and came as a surprise to Auton. “People came up to us to say they had never seen the church look so lovely,” she said.
A Past Worth Preserving Cook will move into Auton’s home in Fairfax Station. He recently sold the 16-acre Leesburg farm he and Di lived on for over 40 years, known as Historic Rock Spring, to the City of Leesburg, to be used as a park. “It was important to Di that the land be preserved,” he said.
Accidental Vintage Auton’s wedding dress was at least 21 years old, she estimated, and Cook’s suit was more than 30. “We were not in today’s fashions by any means,” she said, unapologetically.
Gratitude The day after the wedding, Auton and Cook sent thank-you emails and texts to each of their guests. “At 85 and 90, we wake up each day with a sense of profound thanks-giving: for you, for our health and for the joy of hoping to continue to be of value in this world,” they wrote. They signed their first correspondence as husband and wife with, “Many thanks from two wrinkly, creaky, wobbly but very grateful people.”
L.A. is proof that sometimes all you need is a car, a streetlamp and that orange light to make something really special happen. Jonathan Anderson presented his first Dior Cruise show in L.A. under the fluttering shadows cast by Peter Zumthor’s new Brutalist building at LACMA, and the whole thing felt like the equivalent of sending a text after hours of getting ready, buzzing with anticipation: “I’m OMW.”
At the base of the David Geffen Galleries, anchored by classic American cars in colors like bubblegum and butter, where models sat inside sucking lollipops and talking close, was “an illusion of L.A., in L.A.,” so say the show notes. The scene mirrored the energy of a film set, all drama and specific lighting and smoke billowing from mysterious corners, honoring the house’s relationship with cinema. The show notes also came in the form of a film script — titled “Wilshire Boulevard” — opening with the “No Dior, No Dietrich!” of it all and followed by Anderson’s thoughts on escapism and dreaming. Today’s Hollywood stars — Taylor Russell, Greta Lee, Anya Taylor-Joy, Alison Oliver, Jisoo, Maude Apatow, Jeff Goldblum, Sabrina Carpenter, to name a few — were in attendance.
The looks that walked down the runway also called upon the dream, soundtracked by a score that included blues icon John Lee Hooker and beloved French band Air. A new iteration of the Dior Saddle bag was car-inspired, sharing DNA with John Galliano’s 2001 Dior Cadillac bags, featuring car paint surfaces and motor key charms. There were the bespoke Philip Treacy hats that revisited a technique the milliner has honed for years, with feathers forming typography in words like “Buzz” and “Flow,” worn with some of the men’s looks. There was Anderson’s take on the bar jacket that Christian Dior made for Marlene Dietrich to wear in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Stage Fright,” white with a geometric black collar. A grey flannel coat was inspired by film noir, featuring a stripe detail that took inspiration from Venetian blinds. A red velvet dress with a rosette was Anderson’s way of playing with Christian Dior’s practice of putting a red dress partway through a show “simply to wake people up.”
As polished-glam and old-Hollywood as the references were, there were moments that also felt sleazy and fun in the way that Hollywood in 2007 did, when getting photographed pouring out of a car on the way into the club was a rite of passage and full of its own twisted promise. Denim was intentionally pilled and embroidered with fine silver chains in the rips, replacing frayed strands of cotton (“the everyday becomes couture,” the show notes say). Leather pants were worn with oversized rhinestone-rimmed sunglasses. A fuzzy coat in almost a wood grain-like pattern was worn slipshod over a shoulder with a black dress. Shirts were made in collaboration with L.A. artist Ed Ruscha, worn by models with messy long hair and hands in their pockets, sporting the kind of attitudinal walk that the skater boy-actor-model working at your local coffee shop has perfected. “When I think of L.A., I think of Ruscha’s work, which has a fascinating sense of the mundane and how it relates to the city’s grandeur,” Anderson wrote in the notes.
A resort collection is all about the destination, and in L.A. a destination can be the most quotidian, normal-ass place. For example, even the rarest piece in your closet is first experienced by your car, or your backyard, or the courtyard of a county museum. L.A. people get that the mundane is the destination because our version of mundane is anything but.
Cut to the afters at the Chateau Marmont. It was a blur of champagne, full sized In-N-Out cheeseburgers, chic ushers wearing Dior uniforms with snug grey sweaters and slacks that pooled perfectly at the leg. Oh, and also, a collective fear that someone would slip and fall into the gleaming turquoise pool (but isn’t that the intrusive thought that hangs over every Chateau party?). Faces like Teyana Taylor, Mikey Madison, Paul W. Downs, Role Model and Dominic Fike, all in Dior, were soaking in the ambiance.
As the night waned and we piled into big black SUVs with an emblematic “CD” on the windows that were there to take us home, one couldn’t help but call to mind a Hollywood trope, where in L.A., the journey was the destination all along.
Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson.
Taylor Russell and Mikey Madison.
Malcolm McRae and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Greta Lee and her parents.
Steven Yeun and Humberto Leon.
That spot did not go over well with many fliers, who voiced their disagreement on social media (it’s unclear that getting gussied up would solve the upset caused by delayed flights, increasingly tiny seats and other flying indignities). But it was merely a warm-up for the longer show, which has its debut next month on YouTube. This one features Duffy in a whole variety of dad outfits straight from the “Father Knows Best” closet of the American mind, with his family as supporting characters, down to their matching PJs.
There he is in the Oval Office, introducing his kids (and the show’s concept) to President Trump as white-collar dad in a Trumpian outfit of blue suit, white shirt and red-and-blue tie. There he is in snowy Montana, leading his gang on snowmobiles in coordinated snowsuits. In Philadelphia, he’s in a polo shirt and jeans, introducing his children to a role-playing Benjamin Franklin. He hangs out in a plaid shirt with Kid Rock, a scene that also features Duffy’s wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox anchor, in an American flag sweater and matching American flag cowboy boots. (The two met on the reality show “Road Rules: All Stars.”) He wears a lot of shackets. And that’s just in the show’s four-minute promo.
In other words, this does not seem to be in the mode of the storied road trips of American pop-culture mythology, be they the grungy road trip of Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider” or the existential one of Chloé Zhao’s Oscar winner “Nomadland.” It does not even seem to be modeled on the gaffe-filled comic road trip of the Griswold clan in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”
It’s more like “Road Trip: The Suburban Nostalgia Version.” (See the cars, which include throwback station wagons redolent of “Leave It to Beaver” and a big, black Toyota SUV with Duffy, of course, in the driver’s seat.) It was conceived, presumably, to evoke the values — “wholesome,” “patriotic,” “joyful” — enumerated by Duffy in his post on X and meant to define the show and, by association, himself.
As such, it effectively brands him as the Everydad of the administration, complete with ur-weekend wardrobe. And when it finally airs next month, it may turn out to be less about actual reality (reality TV rarely is) than about heavily messaged reality. In other words: marketing for history.
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