When cocktails under that name became really popular in England, which was not until some time after the establishment of American-bars, we had no doubt as to the derivation. To us it was a short drink that cocked your tail, using the same metaphor as to keep your tail up. If you exhibited a sporting dog of the setter type, which tends to carry its tail low except in action, the show photographer would tell you to cock that dog’s tail.… A cocktail was therefore what I suppose today would be called a pepper-upper.
This, of course, was only speculation at a long distance in time, for the DAE traces cocktail in American use to 1806, and Partridge says that it reached England c. 1870, but it should be added that the NED traces cocktail, applied to horses, to 1769, and cock-tail proud to 1600. The sixth etymology has no authority save an ingenious suggestion by Mr. William S. Gleim, of Rohrerstown, Pa.3 He writes:
In many English taverns the last of the liquor drawn from barrels of ardent spirits, otherwise the cock-tailings,4 were thrown together in a common receptacle. This mixture was sold to topers at a reduced price, so, naturally, they would call for cocktails. The word was evidently imported to describe our popular drink composed of several liquors. I know of one saloon in Philadelphia where the bartender saved all hard drinks that were not entirely consumed by the customers. These remainders were poured into a demijohn, which when full, would be taken to a nearby auction-room and sold as cocktails to the highest bidder.
The seventh etymology is taken from a statement made in court by an English solicitor, Thomas Bagley, in 1937, and cabled to the United States by the alert United Press. It sounds very fishy. A cocktail today consists essentially of any hard liquor, any milder diluent, and a dash of any pungent flavoring. The DAE’s first example of the use of the word, dated 1806, shows that it was then compounded of “spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” A later quotation, 1833, defines it as “composed of water, with the addition of rum, gin, or brandy, as one chooses — a third of the spirits to two-thirds of the water; add bitters, and enrich with sugar and nutmeg.” Bartlett, in his second edition of 1859, gave only the bare word cocktail and said it then consisted of “brandy or gin mixed with sugar and a very little water,” but by the time he came to his fourth edition of 1877 he was listing no less than seven varieties — the brandy, the champagne, the gin, the Japanese, the Jersey, the soda and the whiskey. He did not, however, give their formulae. When the Martini, the Bronx, the old-fashioned, the sidecar, the Daiquiri, the orange blossom, the Alexander, the Dubonnet, the Manhattan and the other popular cocktails of today were invented I do not know: the DAE lists only the Manhattan and traces it only to 1894. The principal manuals for bartenders list hundreds: in the Savoy Cocktail Book there are actually formulae for nearly 700. I have myself invented eleven, and had nine named after me. William Warren Woollcott1 and I once employed a mathematician to figure out how many could be fashioned of the materia bibulica ordinarily available in a first-rate bar. He reported that the number was 17,864,392,788. We tried 273 at random, and found them all good, though some, of course, were better than others.
In the Gothic Age of American drinking as of American word-making, between the Revolution and the Civil War, a great many-fantastic drinks were invented, and some of them were given equally fantastic names, e.g., horse’s neck, stone-fence (or stone-wall), brandy-crusta, brandy-champarelle, blue-blazer, locomotive, bishop and stinkibus. Of these, the DAE passes over all save the stone-fence, which it describes as a mixture of whiskey and cider and traces to 1843. As a gesture, perhaps, of appeasement it adds the switchel, a banal drink of molasses and water, usually flavored with ginger and vinegar1 but sometimes with rum, which it traces to 1790; the anti-fogmatic, i.e., any sort of hard liquor “taken on the pretext of counteracting the effects of fog,” which it traces to 1789;2 the timber-doodle, first recorded (by Charles Dickens in his “American Notes”) in 1842; the hold-fas, 1844; and the eggnog, which it marks an American invention and traces to c. 1775. Bartlett, less inhibited, adds many more, e.g., the bald-face, the black-jack, the bust-head, the ching-ching, the deadbeat, the deacon, the floater, the fiscal agent, the knickerbocker, the moral suasion, the pine-top, the phlegm-cutter, the ropee, the shambro, the silver-top, the snap-neck, the split-ticket, the stagger-juice, and the vox popidi.3 The touring Englishmen of those days always marked such grotesque drink-names, and when they got home spread the news of them. Some of these Columbuses, it appears, embellished the list with outlandish inventions of their own, for in 1868 an American writing in Tinsley’s Magazine (London) was protesting against the practice.4 “Genuine American drinks,” he said, “have names strange enough; but the fact that certain decoctions are called brandy-smashes, mint-juleps and sherry-cobblers scarcely justifies the invention of the Haymarket corpse-reviver, or of Mr. George Augustus Sala’s that thing and that other thing.” The fashion for such names began to pass out after the Civil War, and the new drinks of the 1865–1900 era, the Golden Age of American drinking, were largely eponymous and hence relatively decorous, e.g., rickey and John Collins. The high-ball came in about 1895, and the DAE’s first example is dated 1898. It was, of course, simply the English whiskey-and-soda, which had been familiar to American visitors to England for many years.5 The etymology of high-ball remains obscure. Some authorities say that it was borrowed from the argot of railroad men, to whom a high-ball means a signal from a conductor to an engineer to go ahead. Others say that it originated from the fact that ball, in the 90s, was common bartender’s slang for a glass, and the glass used for a high-ball was naturally taller than that used for an old-time straight whiskey. There is also some dispute about the identity of the bartender who introduced the high-ball to the United States. It has been claimed for an unnamed member of the faculty of the Parker House in Boston, but Patrick Gavin Duffy, in his “Official Mixer’s Manual,” says that he himself shoved the first across the bar in 1895, and adds that the New York Times has allowed his priority.1 The high-ball came in on the heels of Scotch whiskey, which was but little drunk in America before 1895.2 It quickly became enormously popular, and it has retained its popularity ever since. During Prohibition days the custom arose of substituting ginger-ale for soda-water, especially in rye high-balls, but it has never been approved by either high-toned bartenders or enlightened boozers.
Many generic names for alcoholic stimulants, some of them racy and amusing, have been current in the United States since the Gothic Age, e.g., nose-paint, milk of the wild cow, belly-wash, hog-wash, tangle-foot, sheep-dip, snake medicine, red-eye, gum-tickler, phlegm-cutter, gall-breaker, coffin-varnish and bug-juice.3 There are also generic names for various kinds and classes of drinks, e.g., joy-water and fire-water for whiskey; foolish-water and bubble-water for champagne; Jersey lightning for apple-jack; prairie oyster for a drink with an egg in it; red-ink and Dago-red for red wine; and hard liquor for any kind of distilled stuff.1 The DAE traces snake-medicine to 1865, when it appeared in the chaste pages of Harper’s Magazine. Nose-paint is first recorded in 1881, but is probably much older. Smile, as a euphemism for a drink, goes back to 1850; stick, in the sense of a slug of liquor, to 1854; to set ’em up to 1851; pony to 1849; finger to 1856; jigger to 1836; snifter to 1848;2 shot-in-the-neck, the predecessor of shot-in-the-arm, to 1851; and long drink to 1828.3 Jim-jams, which is marked an Americanism by the DAE, is traced to 1852. Straight is also an Americanism, first recorded in 1862: the English use neat. Whether or not soft-drink is another remains to be determined. The first known English example antedates the first American example, but further investigation may establish American priority. The DAE’s earliest example of schooner is from Bartlett’s fourth edition of 1877, but the term must be considerably older. To rush the growler, traced to 1888, is also older. To rush the can is not listed, nor are bucket (or scuttle) of suds, chaser, hooker, nip, pick-me-up, on a binge, brannigan, slug (though to slug up is traced to 1856), water-wagon, to spike (a drink), hang-over (in the alcoholic sense), dark-brown taste, morning aft
er, kick, katzenjammer, bung-starter,4 keg-drainer, bar-rail, souse, stew, bun or jitters. Some of these may be omitted by the DAE on the ground that they have come in since 1900 and others on the ground that they are also used in England, but probably not many. It traces bracer to 1829, eye-opener to 1818, on a bender to 1846, on a bat to 1848, to liquor up to 1850, to set ’em up to 1851, family entrance to 1881, barrel-house to 1883, bust-head to 1863, and red-eye to 1819, and marks them all Americanisms. Its first example of booze-fighter is from a poem by Carl Sandburg, 1916: the term is actually much older. So is booze-fight, which is run back no further than 1922.1 It does not list booze-h’ister at all, nor hooch, though it has hoochino, which the authority it quotes describes as “the name of firewater in Alaska.” Frappé, applied to a very cold drink, is said by a newspaper lexicographer to have been introduced by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1848, but for this I have been unable to find any evidence.
Prohibition increased enormously the number of American boozers, both relatively and absolutely, and made the whole nation booze-conscious, and as a result its everyday speech was peppered with terms having to do with the traffic in strong drink, e.g., bootlegger, bathtub-gin, rum-runner, bone-dry, needle-beer2 and jake (Jamaica ginger). A number of earlier terms for the cruder varieties of whiskey, e.g., forty-rod (traced to “The Witches of New York,” by Mortimer N. Thomson (Philander Doesticks) 1858, and defined by him as “warranted to kill at forty rods”),3 tarantula-juice (traced by the DAE to 1861), white-mule,4 squirrel-whiskey,5 and panther-sweat6 were revived, and such novelties as depth-bomb and third-rail1 were added. Denatured alcohol from which some effort had been made to remove the (usually) poisonous denaturant acquired the special name of smoke, and this was also applied to alcohol in combination with some waxy substance, sold for heating purposes. The user of such high exhilarants was called a smoke-eater. The Prohibitionists, throughout the Thirteen Years, kept on using their old favorite, rum, to designate all alcoholic drinks, including even beer.2 Its employment went back to the days before the distillation of whiskey became general, when rum was actually the chief tipple of American dipsomaniacs. Some of its derivatives date from the Eighteenth Century. The DAE traces rum-dealer to 1860, rummery to 1851, rum-mill to c. 1849, rum-hole to 1836, rummy to 1834, rum-seller to 1781, rum-guzzler to 1775, rum-house to 1739 and rum-shop to 1738. I can’t find rum-blossom in any of the American vocabularies of slang save that of Berrey and Van den Bark, who do not date it, but rum-bud, which may have preceded it, is listed by Bartlett and credited to Dr. Benjamin Rush, who died in 1813. Speak-easy is not listed by the DAE, and may not be an Americanism, for though it is missing from P. W. Joyce’s “English as We Speak It In Ireland,”3 it is said by other authorities to be a term of long standing in that country. In 1922 M. A. M. Tasker said in the London Sunday Times:
I well remember, more than fifty years ago, the definition of a spake-aisy shop as a place where illicit whiskey was sold. The explanation was accompanied by a rather irreverent reference to St. Patrick, in the following terms:
No wonder that the saint himself
To take a drop was willin’,
For his mother kept a spake-aisy shop
In the town of Enniskillen.4
The wild boozing of Prohibition days gave hard service to the large répertoire of American synonyms for drunk, and brought in a number of new ones. In the main, however, old ones were preferred, e.g., cock-eyed, pifflicated, boozed-up, paralyzed, orey-eyed, soused, corned and stewed. The English have a great many terms of the same sort,1 and some of them have been borrowed in this country, e.g., half seas over, but Americans have also been rolling their own since an early day. Benjamin Franklin was apparently the first to attempt to list them. This he did in the New England Courant in 1722, when he was but sixteen years old. His list included only nineteen terms, but fifteen years later, after he had moved to Philadelphia and become publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, he expanded it to 228 terms and printed it again in his paper. A few months later it was reprinted in the South Carolina Gazette of Charleston, in which he also had an interest. His purpose in compiling it, as he explained in a preface, was to issue a warning against drunkenness, which was then very prevalent in the colonies, as it was in England. This vice, he said, “bears no kind of similitude with any sort of virtue, from which it might possibly borrow a name, and is therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of being expressed by distant round-about phrases and of perpetually varying those phrases as often as they come to be well understood to signify plainly that a man is drunk.” At the end of his list he said: “The phrases in this dictionary are not (like most of our terms of art) borrowed from foreign languages, neither are they collected from the writings of the learned in our own, but gathered wholly from the modern tavern-conversation of tipplers.” Whether he meant by this to indicate that they were all of American origin is not clear, but Edward D. Seeber has shown that, of his 228 terms, 90 are not to be found in either the NED or the English Dialect Dictionary.2 Some of the latter are pungent and picturesque, e.g., bewitched, been to Barbados,3 cramped, curved, got a brass eye, frozen, flushed, has his flag out, gold-headed, had a kick in the guts, has bet his kettle, muddy, nimptopsical, oiled, pigeon-eyed, ragged and as stiff as a ring-bolt. At least one is still in use today, to wit, stewed. There are also some good ones among those that Franklin apparently borrowed from England,1 e.g., afflicted, in his airs, buzzey, bungey, cherubimical, cherry-merry, disguised, dipped his bill, seen the devil, wet both eyes, fears no man, fuzzled, glaized, top-heavy, loose in the hilt, juicy, lordly, lappy, limber, moon-eyed, overset,2 raddled, seafaring, in the suds, staggerish, in a trance and out of the way. Here, again, there have been survivals, e.g., boozy, cock-eyed, fuddled, jagged, muddled, mellow, has a skin full, soaked, and half seas over.3
A little while back, I noted some of the early American names, all of them in rum, for drinking place. Others of different pattern are listed in AL4, p. 292. The DAE traces café to 1893, buffet to 1890, sample-room to 1869 and exchange to 1856, all euphemisms for barroom, which goes back to 1807, or saloon, which is traced to 1841. During the last gory battle against Prohibition, in 1930 and 1931, most of the wet leaders of the country sought to convince waverers by promising that, in case of repeal, the old-time saloon should not be revived.4 When an overwhelming (and somewhat unexpected) victory followed in 1932, and it appeared that the triumphant antinomians of the country demanded its restoration exactly as it was, with the traditional brass rail, the mirror behind the bar and even something resembling the free-lunch of happy memory, there arose a need to invent new and mellifluous names for it. So far as I know there is not a single undisguised saloon in the United States today. They are all taverns,1 cocktail-lounges, taprooms, beer-stubes or the like. Some are even called bars, lounge-bars or cocktail-bars, but saloon seems to be definitely out.2 The snobbish English saloon-bar never got a lodgment in this country, and neither did bar-parlour, snug or pub.3 Nor are our wets familiar with such English names for drinks as pint-of-bitter,4 gin-and-French, and audit ale. Bitter is an abbreviation of bitter-beer, which is of rather indefinite meaning, but signifies, in general, a beer containing a reasonable sufficiency of hops. Gin-and-French (sometimes gin-and-it)5 is a mixture of dry gin and French vermouth, differing from a dry Martini in containing rather more vermouth, and no ice. Audit-ale is a strong ale that used to be brewed in the English universities for drinking on audit-day, when the students had to settle their college accounts. A writer in the London Morning Post said of it in 19366 that it is brewed “from beer instead of from water,” though how this is accomplished he did not explain. “Some Oxford colleges,” he continued, “are now the only places where audit-ale is brewed. It is drunk there, as is fitting, only on rare occasions.” Two other English drinks are seldom drunk in this country, though neither can be said to be unknown. They are half-and-half and shandygaff. The former is defined by the NED as “a mixture of two malt liquors, especially ale and porter,” a
nd traced to 1756. The latter is defined as “a mixture of beer and ginger-beer” and traced to 1853. The late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong, informed me that in that colony shandygaff was often compounded of ale and ginger-ale, and sometimes even of lager-beer and bottled lemonade. I have myself drunk more than one horn of half-and-half (always pronounced arf-’n-arf, in deference to the English) compounded of beer and porter, or beer and brown stout. Black velvet is a mixture of porter and champagne.
So much for the vocabulary of bacchanalia in the Republic. The American contributions to that of politics have been almost as lush and impressive, and many of them go back likewise to the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. A shining example is O.K., without question the most successful of all Americanisms, old or new. The long battle over its etymology, described at length in AL4, pp. 205 ff, came to a dramatic end on July 19, 1941, when Allen Walker Read published in the Saturday Review of Literature an article1 which, for the first time, brought forward a body of evidence that was new, sound and precisely to the point. That evidence was to the effect that O.K. made its first appearance in print in the New York New Era on March 23, 1840, that it was then part of the name of the Democratic O.K. Club, an organization of supporters of Martin Van Buren for a second term in the White House, and that it was an abbreviation of Old Kinderhook, the name of the Hudson Valley village in which he had been born in 1782. The association of Kinder-hook with his name was by no means new. He had been known to his political enemies since the early days of the Albany Regency as the Kinderhook Fox, and to his followers as the Sage, Magician or Wizard of Kinderhook, and it was thus natural for one of the rowdy clubs which supported him in New York to call itself after the little town. Who thought of reducing the name to O.K. is not known but it was in accord with the liking for secrecy and mystification that marked the politics of the time. The Democratic O.K. Club held its first recorded meeting in the house of Jacob Colvin, at 245 Grand street, on March 24, 1840, and the new name caught on at once. It was brief, it had a masculine and even bellicose ring, and it was mysterious enough to have a suggestion of the sinister. By the next day O.K. had become a sort of slogan among the other Locofocos of the city, the lower orders of whom had been masquerading for some time past under similar dark and puzzling names, e.g., Butt-enders, Roarers, ers, Huge Paws, Ringtails and Ball-rollers. On March 27, when the New York Whigs ventured to hold a meeting in Masonic Hall, a gang of Locofocos, using O.K. as their war-cry, raided it and tried to break it up. “About 500 stout, strapping men,” said the New York Herald the next morning, “marched three and three, noiselessly and orderly. The word O.K. was passed from mouth to mouth, a cheer was given, and they rushed into the hall upstairs, like a torrent.” The gang was headed, added the Daily Express, “by Custom House officers and a Locofoco street inspector.” Naturally enough, the meaning of O.K. provoked speculation, and at once the anti-Locofoco newspapers began to print derisory interpretations. On May 27 the New Era, in reporting the appearance of an O.K. breastpin, stated categorically that the term was “significant of the birthplace of Martin Van Buren, Old Kinderhook,” but that did not shut off the rising flood of rival etymologies. One of these, appearing in the Herald on March 30, was to have the curious fate of being accepted gravely, in one form or another, for a full century. It was as follows:
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