cold turkey
21
6.7
- idiom
- /koʊld ˈtɜrki/
- Informal
:
dejar algo de golpe (informal)
- So I pulled myself together and I quit drinking, cold turkey.
I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the cold Turkey.
- I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the cold Turkey.
- OK, so if you've tried a cold Turkey twice and haven't made it, third time is going to be the charm.
- What is what is cold Turkey feeling like?
- Is that process the clock, the withdrawal, the tripping out the cold Turkey.
Examples
-
I'll never forget when he said, 'Welfare is a drug—and you gotta kick it cold turkey.'
Fiction book (1992) -
All three managed to stop smoking cold turkey, with Luanne's help ("Keeping Up With Our Joneses").
Blog text (33) -
I think you just have to go cold turkey.
-
You know, it's not good for you to quit cold turkey.
-
One day I just decided to quit it cold turkey, and I never looked back!
Blog text (31) -
I managed to quit cold turkey, as I did for smoking a few years prior.
Blog text (25) -
I quit meth cold turkey that day, almost four or five years ago.
Blog text (32) -
Thousands in the audience pledge to give up their addictions cold turkey.
Blog text (19) -
If I’m a sex addict, then I’m going cold turkey.
-
Cindy confessed and said she quit the pills cold turkey that day.
Antonyms
How Abrupt
Surface Forms
Morphology
cold + turkey
The meaning 'to quit abruptly' cannot be derived from the literal senses of 'cold' and 'turkey' because 'turkey' contributes no semantic cue and 'cold' only weakly suggests suddenness; together they form an arbitrary idiom. This expression is historically and culturally opaque and lacks a cross-linguistic transparent counterpart, so a B1 learner who knows the words would not reliably predict the idiomatic meaning.
Etymology
Cold turkey may come from a simple image: when a person quits an addiction quickly, they can feel very cold and get goosebumps, so their skin looked like a plucked turkey. So cold turkey means to stop something 'suddenly and completely', without slowly cutting down.