Donna Leo Cameron, age 11, of Be moat, Mass., for her question:

How did the turkey get its name?

There are those who say that the turkey was named for the one word in his vocabulary. In conversation, of which he is very fond, he repeats it over and over in groups of three ‑ turk‑turk‑turk, for a talker, he certainly is a turkey. Others say that our turkey got his name because the 15th Century Europeans confused him with the guinea fowl ‑ who was also called a turkey.

Those people seem to have been in a fog of confusion about the origin of their table birds. For the guinea fowl is a native of Africa. He merely used Turkey as a port of call when ho was being taken to the Spanish dominions. Our big, beautiful Thanksgiving turkey is a native of the New World. We cannot blame the people of the Old World for wanting to import our turkey. But it is hard to see how they confused him with the plump, polka dotted guinea fowl who, at that time, they called a turkey.

All this confusion, of course, occurred long before the urban Society started its detective work on the bird world. The truth is that the only turkeys in Turkey were taken there from their native American homes. Perhaps it would be more simple to say that the turkey was named from his turk‑turk‑turkey conversation.