Everything You Need To Know About COLD TURKEY

Everything you need to know about cold turkey. The idiom, the writer’s app, the song, the movie.

What does Cold Turkey mean?

“Cold turkey” is a term describing the actions of a person who gives up his habit or addiction at a single moment, rather than through gradually easing the process through tapering off or supplemental medication. -urbandictionary.com

In the past cold turkey was used in association with drug addiction. Today it is used more widely to describe a sudden and abrupt cessation of a bad habits or activities including smoking, eating specific foods, and stopping gaming, phone texting and Internet surfing.   Cold turkey almost always includes the implication that stopping is going to be painful, hard, difficult and simply awful.

What habits, activities or addictions have YOU gone cold turkey for?

How did the phrase Cold Turkey come into being?

Speculations as to where and when the term cold turkey originated vary widely …

The term allegedly derives from the comparison of a cold turkey carcass and the state of a withdrawing addict — most notably, the cold sweats and gooseflesh. It is often preceded by the word ‘going’, as ‘going cold turkey’.”–Wikipedia

I especially like this explanation from Merriam-Webster.

But why turkey, and why cold? The most popular theory was repeated by the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1978: “It derives from the hideous combination of goosepimples [sic] and what William Burroughs calls ‘the cold burn’ that addicts suffer as they kick the habit.” In Cop Speak: The Lingo of Law Enforcement and Crime, Tom Philbin recites a second theory, that “the term may derive from the cold, clammy feel of the skin during withdrawal, like a turkey that has been refrigerated.”

When YOU go cold turkey, do you feel like this?

Did you know there is a Cold Turkey app for writers?

The Cold Turkey app consists of three products: a blocker, a writer and a micromanager.

The “product” that I have found to be MOST useful is the Writer’s app.  It turns your computer into a typewriter.   All you can do is write.  No formatting, just writing.

Once you start the app, there is NO way to get out of it … you either HAVE to spend a specific amount of time writing, OR write the number of words you committed to.

All you can do is WRITE

The FREE app may be all you need. 

Did you know John Lennon wrote and recorded a Cold Turkey song?

Lyrics

Did you know there are FOUR Cold Turkey movies?

One of them is the hilarious Cold Turkey Cold Turkey  a 1971 satirical comedy film. It stars Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart plus a long list of comedic actors. The film was directed, co-produced and co-written by Norman Lear.

In a nutshell:

“As part of a public relations and marketing strategy to compare the empathy of Big Tobaccoto the nobility of the Nobel Peace Prize advertising executive Merwin Wren (Newhart) convinces the Valiant Tobacco Company to propose a challenge: a tax-free check for $25,000,000 ($170.8 million today) to any city or town in America that can stop smoking, going cold turkey, for thirty days.”    –Wikipedia

Here are forty-two turkey leftover recipes just in case you have a cold turkey hanging around your kitchen.