Fowl Talk for the Holidays

[NewsCaster]

Birds rank high in the lexicon of insult. For example, and this is just for openers, you can be dumb as a dodo, crazy as a coot, silly as a goose, a sitting duck, or simply a dupe (from de huppe, the hoopoe, an Old World bird, said to be more stupid than most).

One would have thought that the turkey might have escaped this. Virtually our national dish, it has graced dinner tables in the English-speaking world since the sixteenth century.

Thus, from 1573: "Christmas husbandrie fare . . . shred pies of the best . . . and turkey well drest" (Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie).

The Huffington Post