New-world foods were named after distant places they did not come from

Evidence

The reason for the mystery is that the bird which in English is called “turkey,” in Turkish is called hindi, Indian. It was an American bird, unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere before the discoveries of the American continents. Wanting to give it an exotic name, something odd, something different, Europeans made do with the most exotic they could think of. So people called it the the Indian bird, dinde (d’Inde) in French, and equivalents in other languages. In time the bird reached the Middle East, where, in Arabic, it is called dik habashi or dik rumi, the Ethiopian bird or the Greek bird. In fact, the bird is neither Ethiopian nor Greek, neither Turkish nor Indian. All these words simply mean something strange and exotic from a far and unknown place. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 219

Categorization

• CANDY: The turkey name origin is a light, tweetable party fact.
• ADDENDUM: Directly continues the pattern in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ of cross-cultural naming-as-exoticism, here applied to food rather than dress.