The Universe of Discourse

Turkish John Doe

A few weeks ago I was writing something about Turkey, and I needed a generic Turkish name, analogous to “John Doe”. I was going to use “Osman Yılmaz”, which I think would have been a decent choice, but I decided it would be more fun to ask a Turkish co-worker what the correct choice would be. I asked Kıvanç Yazan, who kindly allowed himself to be nerdsniped and gave me a great deal of information. In the rest of this article, anything about Turkish that is correct should be credited to him, while any mistakes are surely my own.

M. Yazan informs me that one common choice is “Ali Veli”. Here's a link he gave me to Ekşisözlük, which is the Turkish analog of Urban Dictionary, explaining (in Turkish) the connotations of “John Doe”. The page also mentions “John Smith”, which in turn links to a page about a footballer named Ali Öztürk—in fact two footballers. ([1] [2]) which is along the same lines as my “Osman Yılmaz” suggestion.

But M. Yazan told me about a much closer match for “John Doe”. It is:

sarı çizmeli Mehmet Ağa

which translates as “Mehmet Agha with yellow boots”. (‘Sarı’ = ‘yellow’; ‘çizmeli’ = ‘booted’.)

This oddly specific phrase really seems to be what I was looking for. M. Yazan provided several links:

• Ekşisözlük again

• The official dictionary of the Turkish government

  Unfortunately I can't find any way to link to the specific entry, but the definition it provides is “kim olduğu, nerede oturduğu bilinmeyen kimse” which means approximately “someone whose identity/place is unknown”.

• A paper on “Personal Names in Sayings and Idioms”.

  This is in Turkish, but M. Yazan has translated the relevant part as follows:

  At the time when yellow boots were in fashion, a guy from İzmir put "Mehmet Aga" in his account book. When time came to pay the debt , he sent his servant and asked him to find "Mehmet Aga with yellow boots". The helper did find a Mehmet Aga, but it was not the one they were looking for. Then guy gets angry at his servant, to which his helper responded, “Sir, this is a big city, there are lots of people with yellow boots, and lots of people named Mehmet! You should write it in your book one more time!”

Another source I found was this online Turkish-English dictionary which glosses it as “Joe Schmoe”.

Finding online mentions of sarı çizmeli Mehmet Ağa is a little bit tricky, because he is also the title of a song by the very famous Turkish musician Barış Manço, and the references to this song swamp all the other results. This video features Manço's boots and although we cannot see for sure (the recording is in grayscale) I presume that the boots are yellow.

Thanks again, Kıvanç!

[ Addendum: The Turkish word for “in style” is “moda”. I guessed it was a French loanword. Kıvanç tells me I was close: it is from Italian. ]

[ Addendum 20171219: Wikipedia has an impressive list of placeholder names by language that includes Mehmet Ağa. ]

[ Addendum 20180105: The Hebrew version of Mehmet Ağa is at least 2600 years old! ]

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