Cold Turkey
"To stop a habit or addiction abruptly and completely, without weaning off gradually."
The popular explanation pictures withdrawal-induced goosebumps and pale, clammy skin resembling a plucked, refrigerated turkey. It's a vivid image, but it doesn't line up with the timeline. The earliest known uses of "cold turkey" predate its addiction-specific meaning entirely, and researchers now think it more likely grew from combining "cold," meaning blunt or unprepared, with the older expression "talk turkey," meaning to speak plainly. The phrase was first tied specifically to drug withdrawal in a Canadian newspaper in 1921.
Myth vs. FactThe plucked-turkey-skin theory is the one most people know, but it doesn't fit the evidence: the phrase already existed with unrelated, non-addiction meanings before it was ever applied to withdrawal.
Sources: The Daily Colonist (Victoria, Canada), October 1921; earlier general use of 'cold' and 'talk turkey' documented from the early 1900s.
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