The Wise Book of Whys (5 page)

Why Three Strikes in a Row in Bowling is Called a “Turkey”

This is thought to have its origins in bowling tournament prizes. Late eighteenth and early nineteenth century prizes given out during these tournaments were often food items, such as a basket filled with various grocery items, a large ham, or the like.

Particularly around Thanksgiving in the United States,
turkeys became common prizes. At some point (no one knows the exact first instance), one tournament decided to give away a turkey to people who managed to bowl three strikes in a row. This practice spread and eventually embedded itself in common bowling vernacular, long after giving away actual turkeys stopped.

You might wonder
how those individuals running tournaments managed to make any money at all when they were giving away a turkey every time someone bowled three strikes in a row, let alone prizes for other accomplishments. After all, even complete amateurs can achieve that feat on occasion, and those who are skilled can do it with some regularity.

But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, bowling three strikes in a row was extremely hard to do owing to the fact that they didn’t have nearly the refined, pristine lanes we’re used to today. Further, the pins were setup by hand, sometimes in a not quite uniform fashion; bowling balls tended not to be well balanced; and people running the tournaments would often use tricks to make the pins harder to knock down, such as adding weight in the bottoms of the pins. So bowling three strikes in a row was exceptionally hard to do, even for those who were highly skilled.

With it being somewhat more common to hit three strikes
or more in a row today, new names have been developed to account for the strike-bloat, though usage of these terms isn’t nearly as widespread as with a “Turkey.”

That being said, relatively common terms include: Four
consecutive strikes:  Hambone; Six consecutive strikes:  Wild Turkey; Nine consecutive strikes: Golden Turkey; A Perfect Game, all strikes from start to finish: Dinosaur (supposedly originally because it’s “non-existent like a dinosaur”, though in fact it has been done several times, such as by Grazio Castellano who was the first to bowl a perfect game on live television on October 4, 1953.)

In general, if you can’t remember these names and you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, you can
simply call them a “four bagger,” “five bagger,” etc. for four and five strikes in a row and beyond.

Why Turkeys are Called “Turkeys”

In the sixteenth century, when North American turkeys were first introduced en masse to Europe, there was another bird that was popularly imported throughout Europe and, most relevant to this topic, England, called a guinea fowl. This guinea fowl was imported from Madagascar via the Ottoman Empire. The merchants who imported the guinea fowl were thus known as “turkey merchants.” The guinea fowl eventually were popularly referred to as “turkey fowl,” similar to how other product imported through the Ottoman Empire acquired their names, such as “turkey corn,” “turkey wheat,” etc.

Th
e North American turkey was first introduced to Spain in the very early sixteenth century and popularly introduced to all of Europe shortly thereafter. The animal was thought by many to be a species of the type of guinea fowl that was imported via the Ottoman Empire and thus, began also being called a “turkey fowl” in English, with this eventually being shortened to just “turkey.”

Why Pistachios Used to Be
Dyed Red

Historically, most pistachios in the United States were imported from the Middle East. The problem was that when they arrived, they tended to have numerous blemishes on the shells, particularly stains left over from the harvesting methods employed in the Middle East. These stains weren’t good for marketing purposes. To get around this, importers devised an idea to not only mask the blemishes, but also to help draw the eye to the pistachios, namely, dying them red.

This all began to change in the 1970s when pistachios started to be grown in the U.S. commercially
. Today, the vast majority (upwards of 98%) of pistachios sold in the United States are grown and processed in California with much better harvesting and processing facilities than decades before in the Middle East. These improved facilities result in fewer blemishes and stains appearing on the pistachios, so there is less need to dye them, which is one of the reasons the practice is dying out.

Why Toothpaste Makes Things Like Orange Juice Taste So Awful

You may think it might be the common mint flavor of toothpaste clashing with other flavors, but in the case of orange juice and many other things, this isn’t actually what’s going on
. The culprit here is thought to be two compounds almost universally added to toothpastes -sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium lauryl ether sulfate, which are anionic surfactants, meaning they lower the surface tension of water.

Why is that desirable in toothpaste
? Because it works as something of a detergent, and makes the toothpaste foam to help it spread around inside your mouth easier. Besides any cleaning effect, this has the by-product of making you feel like the toothpaste is doing something, which toothpaste manufacturers have found to be a great way to get people to buy more of their toothpaste.

Mint is added to toothpaste for this same reason, as it leaves your mouth feeling cool, clean, and fresh, part
icularly if it’s well distributed throughout your mouth. As Tracy Sinclair, one-time brand manager at Oral-B stated in the book
The Power of Habit
, “Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working. We can make toothpaste taste like anything — blueberries, green tea — and as long as it has a cool tingle, people feel like their mouth is clean. The tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing the job.”

(
Interestingly enough, besides any real cleaning effect, sodium lauryl sulfate is added to shampoo for similar marketing reasons, as people perceive that foaming shampoo works better than non-foaming,  whether a particular brand’s foaming shampoo actually cleans better than some other non-foaming shampoo or not.)

Back to your taste-buds
-the sodium lauryl sulfate interacts with your sweet taste receptors, making them less sensitive, and thus dulling the sweet flavor. In addition to that, it also destroys phospholipids in your mouth, which are compounds that have the same type of effect sodium lauryl sulfate has on sweet taste buds, except the phospholipids dampen your bitter taste buds.

T
he net effect is that your sweet taste buds are dampened while your bitter taste buds become more sensitive. So when you drink something like orange juice, which normally has an overpowering sweet taste that masks an underlying bitter taste, it is going to taste drastically different -in this case extremely bitter.

So if
for some reason your morning routine includes brushing your teeth before eating, you can simply find toothpaste that is free of sodium lauryl sulfate, and sodium lauryl ether sulfate and the food you eat directly after shouldn’t taste awful, unless you’re bad at cooking, of course.

Why We Have a Seven-Day Week

Two of the earliest known civilizations to use a seven-day week were the Babylonians and the Jews. The Babylonians marked time with lunar months, and it is thought by many scholars that this is why they chose a seven-day week (though direct evidence of lunar months being why they declared a seven-day week is scant).

That being said, each lunar month was made up of several different cycles—on the first day, the first visible crescent appeared; on approximately the seventh
day, the waxing half-Moon could be seen; on approximately the fourteenth, the full Moon; on approximately the twenty-first, the waning half-Moon; and on approximately the twenty-eighth, the last visible crescent. As you can see, each notable cycle is made up of about seven days, hence, the seven-day week.

You’ll notice I used the word “approximate” a lot in there
. This is because the Moon phases don’t line up perfectly with this schedule. As such, as far back as the sixth century BC (which incidentally is also around the time the Jews were captives in Babylon), the Babylonians would sometimes have three seven-day weeks, followed by an eight to nine day week, presumably to re-synchronize the start and end of the weeks to match the phases of the Moon.

In their normal seve
n-day week, the Babylonians held the seventh day of each week as holy, much like the Jews did and still do. However, the Babylonians also held the day to be unlucky. Thus, similar to the Jews (but for a different reason, the unluckiness of the day), the seventh day had restrictions on certain activities to avoid dire consequences from the inherit unluckiness of the day. The final “seventh day” of the month for the Babylonians was a day of rest and worship.

The a
ncient Romans, during the Republic, did not use a seven-day week but rather went with eight days. One “eighth day” of every week was set aside as a shopping day where people would buy and sell things, particularly buying food supplies for the following week.

Rather than labeling the days of the week with actual names, at this time the Romans labeled them with letters, A-H
. You might think from this that the “H” was always the shopping day, but this isn’t correct. You see, the calendar year did not divide evenly by eight. Thus, the day of the week that was the day to go shopping changed every year, but they still often referred to a particular day based on its proximity to the shopping day.

For reasons not entirely clear, within a century after the introduction of the Julian Calendar in
46 BC, the eight-day week started to diminish in popularity in favor of the seven-day week. The full switch was not sudden, happening over centuries. For a time, as the seven-day week grew in popularity, both the seven and eight-day weeks were used in Rome simultaneously. Finally, after the popularity of the eight-day week diminished almost completely, Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, made the seven-day week official in AD 321. Due to the influence of both Rome and Christianity, this has stuck in most regions of the world ever since.