>>>I have always wondered why turkeys say "Gobble gobble" around this time of year... <g> Seems kind of wierd... < BG >
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>>When railway was built to the city of Jagodina, there was a very peculiar ruling on the behavior of the locomotive very soon afterwards. Though the name of the city suggests something quite different ("jagoda" means strawberry), pretty much everyone in the city, except maybe business district downtown, was growing turkeys in their backyards. The ruling said that no locomotive is allowed to use its horn anywhere within the few miles of the city. On rare occasions when this would happen, the waves of gobbling took several hours to die off.
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>>They have a festival of theater comedy there, and the award they give is "The Golden Turkey", goes to the best comedy actors of the year.
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>I guess you're aware that any such-named award here would have a negative connotation.

That's the cultural shift. We'd have a similar connotation for a goose or a gander; and word "turkey" is far less offensive. It's also "The Goldern Gobbler" award (correcting myself after a little pondering over the subject) and the winner gets a statue of a gobbler with probably only as much gold as to line his engraved name on its pod - the theaters and their festivals were never too rich back home.

About ten years ago we used the term "geese" and "data entry operators" interchangeably... and even then we used the euphemism "big white birds". If someone asked "what birds", someone'd say "not swans" and everyone would understand what we meant. That's about the same time when we coined the phrase "only a good user is a good user".