Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

Google is your friend:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nifkin&f=1

Looks like it's a word, equivalent to the female "taint."  Cf.
perineum.

I'll let someone else handle your other question.

Turkish delight, a jellied candy, is known as lokum in Turkey and
loukoumia in Greece. It is also common in Cyprus and Albania. I've
seen claims of credit for the invention from all but the Albanians.
Some general remarks on culinary nationalism (taken from _A
Mediterranean Feast_ by Clifford A. Wright, an excellent cookbook, by
the way) seem relevant to the question:

"The Greeks are not much amenable to the idea that their food might be
indebted to Turkish cooking. It is commonplace for Greek food writers
to present Greek cuisine as 'shaped through 3000 years of history'
.... [and that it] is the ur-cuisine that the Turks, Italians, and
other Europeans borrowed from, not the other way around....

"Greek culinary nationalism has hindered any reasoned debate and
research on this question of the degree to which the Greek people
preserved and maintained the classical heritage through twenty-five
hundred years, including Roman occupation, barbarian invasions, and
five hundred years of occupation by the Turks, not to mention
interference and occupation by Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans. They
ignore the fact that the majority population of peninsular Greece in
the Middle Ages was Slav....

"Unfortunately, there are no comparative historical studies of Greek
and Turkish food by disinterested third-party scholars, although at
least one Greek scholar believes his countrymen claim too much
ownership. In any case, all claims regarding the heritage of Greek
food must be taken with a grain of salt.... As the scholar of medieval
Hellenism, Speros Vryonis Jr., warned, 'In matters of cuisine the
conquerors undoubtedly absorbed some items from the conquered, but the
problem is again obscured by a similarity in Byzantine and Islamic
cuisine which probably existed before the appearance of the Turks.' "

-skipka