Across a large swath of the United States, the winter has been especially cold, snowy, and dreary this year. So here’s a post with a link to a cheery video at the end, just to pick my spirits up—and maybe yours, too.

The English language can be confounding. For example, the word “turkey” is slang for “a person considered inept or undesirable,” while the idiom “cold turkey” describes the actions of one who abruptly gives up a habit rather than through gradual change. Finally, “talking turkey” means “to discuss a problem in a serious way with a real intention to solve it.”

To provide some redeeming social value, let me frame these idioms in terms that are very important to the social science of lean. First the turkeys:

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