Cold Turkey Origins

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sally.

Welcome, Sally. Where are you calling us from?

Portage, Wisconsin.

Sally, what’s on your mind? What can we help with?

18 years ago, I was in massage school, and we had a teacher who had immigrated to the States from Central Europe. And one day he made a comment about, I don’t get this cold turkey. What do you mean? And none of us could tell him why. And so that’s always been a mystery to me. Where did the phrase cold turkey come from? And cold turkey meaning what exactly? As I understand it, like, oh, that person quit smoking cold turkey. It’s like a person quits what they see as a not good habit, and they’re doing it without, I guess, without any help, like, you know, for smoking like they’re not doing it with a smoking patch or something like that.

Right.

They just suddenly do it.

Without preparation.

Without preparation, right.

Right, or any kind of assistance. They go cold turkey without a warm-up.

All right, hold on. I’m not going to go very far with this, actually. What’s really interesting about cold turkey, it’s got a history going back to about the 1890s, and when it first comes up, it’s almost exclusively used in boxing. It’s talking about a fighter quitting a match, cold turkey, or somebody bad-mouthing somebody else and just, like, stopping the argument, cold turkey. And it’s not until the early part of the 1900s that we start to see it being used among people who are trying to quit alcohol or drug use. And over the years, the use of cold turkey to refer to quitting drugs has become more prominent. But there are still many uses of where we might say, I quit something cold turkey that has nothing whatsoever to do with drugs.

And you said something that’s exactly right. It has to do with quitting something that you see is bad for yourself. Like you can quit a relationship, cold turkey, or you can quit a job, cold turkey, or you can just change your mind and say, on the highway, go in a different direction, cold turkey. And you can find zillions of examples of this. But the first uses that we know suggest that it came up as boxing slang, which is pretty interesting.

Yeah, that is interesting.

So why turkey and why cold?

Well, there’s two things happening. We often talk about doing something cold, and that does mean without preparation or warm-up or any kind of. And that’s the use of cold is probably what’s happening here. But the turkey is where we run into some difficulty here. A couple of theories have been proposed that have to do with actual turkey, like the bird, that suggests that when you quit drugs, cold turkey, that you get goosebumps and they resemble the skin of a plucked turkey. However, that’s probably not true because, as I said, the dates don’t work out. The drug uses come much after the term. More likely, turkey just refers to a derogatory name for somebody where he’s a turkey, meaning he’s a fool or a loser or somebody who makes bad choices or a chump, that sort of thing.

So more than likely, the boxing milieu, the boxing environment suggests to me most of all that cold turkey means he quit like a chump. He quit like a loser. He quit like somebody who didn’t have the guts or the courage to carry it out. And so then over time, the meaning transition. And again, most people today think of having to go with drugs. But you’ll still find people talking about, like, yeah, I stopped wearing stretch pants, cold turkey, or something like that.

Sally, what do you think?

Very strange.

Right?

Yeah, slang is weird. You never know what you’re going to get with slang. It’s like a box of chocolates, as they say.

All right, that’s the best that I can give you.

Okay, well, thank you.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Okay.

Bye-bye, Sally.

Bye now.

So 1898 is the first use that I found in boxing.

Yeah.

1898.

I will corner him, and he will either have to go through with the match or quit cold turkey.

Right?

Yeah, that does sound chumpy.

So the church is a coward, not willing to withstand the…

A loser.

A loser, yeah.

Yeah, a flop like a turkey in theater, right?

Yeah, there we go. Somebody with a glass jaw bailing out of a match because they know they can’t hack it.

Yeah.

Right?

Great slang from boxing, right?

Boxing is good.

Yeah, glass jaw, cauliflower ear. It’s not just slang we talk about on the show, and it’s not just word origins. Give us a call if you’ve got anything related to language. We do jokes and riddles, a dispute you had at work, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.