“Poor as Job’s turkey” – it is a phrase your compiler has heard his whole life to describe poverty.  It is obviously of Biblical origin, for the age-old story of the travails of Job (rhymes with  “robe”) have introduced the poetic section of Holy Writ for millennia.  He cannot imagine that anyone but a Southerner would say it, can you?

      One can see where it might have come from, for while the hardships and travails of Job are well-known – as is the tendency of his so-called friends to harp on him about them and suggest they might be his fault.   But if Job lost everything and was desperately wanting in every way, how much worse must it have been for his livestock?

     But why Job’s turkey, specifically, and not his chicken, or cow, or horse?   There is simply no telling; the Old Testament book does not mention that Job had turkeys.  So where did the colorful phrase come from?

     Your compiler is sorely dismayed to reveal that it is not a Southern phrase at all.  In fact, it seems to have been coined by a Canadian humorist, of all people.  Thomas Halliburton (1796-1865) popularized a wry, Yankee character he called, “Sam Slick” in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, and in one of the Sam Slick tales, Halliburton wrote of Job’s turkey, which in the satirical story had but one feather and was so weak with hunger that it had to lean into Job’s barn for support when it wanted to gobble.

   So…your compiler can only suppose that the saying must have been adopted into the South.  Certainly it was true that until around the end of the Second World War, most Southerners were poor, at least as compared to today’s level of affluence.  Your compiler smiles to recall the story an old Fayette friend who grew up in the middle of the county during the 1930s told him once:  ‘We had some cousins come down from Atlanta one evening for supper and to spend the night.   They kept on bragging and bragging about the wonders of their life in Atlanta – with electricity and running water and all – until finally it was bedtime.   Daddy held the Alladin lamp aloft so they could see their way upstairs, and when they stepped into the room we boys had vacated so they’d have a place to sleep, Daddy called out, ‘If  you need anything tonight, just let me know, and I’ll tell you how to do without it.’   We were poor as Job’s turkey, you see, but we saw nothing to be ashamed of in that. We held our heads up high and were good as anybody.”

    That is kind of like Charlestonians after the War Between the States.  Their lovely city was known for a time as, “The City of Peeling Paint and Polished Brass.”   Charlestonians called themselves, “Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.”

    So maybe that is why Southerners adopted the Canadian-born phrase so readily: we do, after all, as a people have some acquaintance with poverty, but we endured it with good grace, even though we were poor as Job’s turkey.