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Talk turkey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5387 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes  Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 9 of 10 14 October 2010 at 4:01am | IP Logged |
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Let's talk turkey does indeed drive from the idea of a meal. The idea is that the preliminaries are finished (appetizers, so to speak) and now we are getting down to the real thing, no more beating around the bush, right to the heart of the matter, and similar metaphors. I don't think it is used too commonly now. The humorous rejoinder to the demand "let's talk turkey" was often to make gobble-gobble noises, which might defuse the tension or increase it.
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 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6175 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 10 14 October 2010 at 5:07am | IP Logged |
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From World Wide Words:
Q From Selinda Chiquoine: I’ve been searching for the origin of talk turkey. A I’ve found three stories about this, none of them wholly convincing. We do know that it’s a US term. It’s first recorded in 1824, but is probably much older; one suggestion is that it goes back as far as colonial times. What the explanations have in common is real turkeys. But the meaning of the phrase seems to have shifted down the years. To start with it meant to speak agreeably, or to say pleasant things; nowadays it usually refers to speaking frankly, discussing hard facts, or getting down to serious business. The change seems to have happened because to “talk turkey” was augmented at some point in the nineteenth century to “talk cold turkey”, with the modern meaning. In the course of time it was abbreviated again, with the shorter form keeping the newer meaning. (The other meaning of “cold turkey” is unrelated.) The most prosaic answer is that the “to talk pleasantly” sense came about through the nature of family conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table. It is also suggested that it arose because the first contacts between Native Americans and settlers often centred on the supply of wild turkeys, to the extent that Indians were said to have enquired whenever they met a colonist, “you come to talk turkey?”. The most complicated explanation is a story about a colonist and a native who went hunting, agreeing to share their spoils equally. At the end of the day, the bag was four crows and four turkeys. The colonist tried to partition the spoils by saying “here’s a crow for you” to the Indian, then keeping a turkey to himself, giving another crow to the Indian, and so on. At this point the Indian very reasonably protested, saying “you talk all turkey for you. Only talk crow for Indian”. I plump for the prosaic Thanksgiving explanation, with a side bet on the turkey trading thesis. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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