Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Grice's Turkey Walk

J reminds us that "Turkey" is short for "Turkey peacock", since the bird was imagined to come from Turkey.

Oddly, I was once reading Birchfield's "Making of the OED" (Faber) and was amused (in the wrong way) by the definition of "Turk" in the old edition of the OED. As I recall, it read:

Turk: an inhabitant of Turkey; wanton child.

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This was later deleted (the second 'use') on the strength of it being politically correct.

Similarly, there was a law suit in the isle of Lesbos (in Greece) against the use of 'Lesbian' to mean 'female lover of a female': "it offends those who are heterosexual and still choose to live on this island".

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