Turkey: The Bird, The Country, The Misunderstanding

What better for the day before Thanksgiving (US variety, at least) to consider the origin of the word turkey. According to several sources I've checked (all of which, for all I know, read the same damned web site at one point or another), the first bird called a turkey is not what we know in this country, but something like a Guinea fowl. It was a bird known to the Greeks and Romans, but that disappeared from Europe until the late 15th or early 16th century. The people who brought the birds to the region were probably Turkish traders, and the birds, at least in England, popularly came to be known as Turkey bird. According to Michael Quinion, only the English thought that the birds came from Turkey, which much of the rest of the world guessed India. Not long after the reintroduction of the guinea fowl, merchants brought actual turkeys from ... Mexico! But they were still associated with Turks, and so became turkeys, even as people realized that there was already a name for the guinea fowl.

Shakespeare know of the bard ... uh, bird ... and mentioned it in a line from Twelfth Night: "O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!" No mention of cranberries or stuffing, however.

Happy National Punctuation Day!

Care for commas? Love the ellipsis? Dote on dashes? Then National Punctuation Day is for you. As the site say, this is "the holiday that reminds America that a 'semicolon is not a surgical procedure.'" Jeff Rubin, the guy who managed to found this event, even has ideas on the site for how to celebrate the occasion.