To conclude, a glass of wine and a cigar. Wine, at least when home-made which was the case among many immigrant Italians, gives grape-stomper for the maker and purple death, red ink and best-known, dago red for the wine. This latter comes from dago, from Spanish Diego, i.e James, and thus usually applied to a Spaniard but which, like greaseball, can also denote a guinea (there is also guinea red), who started off life as black (coming from the Guinea Coast) but was transferred to the Latins. Thus the guinea stinker, a cheap, malodorous cigar, the Italian district of Guinea-town and the guinea football, a bomb but more likely a large firecracker.
Mixed Drinks
SLANG’S TERMS FOR alcohol or liquor or simply for ‘a drink’ reveal that the counter-language offers nearly seven hundred variations. (Drunk finds 1,160 and even drunkard 156). This is not surprising. Along with sex and crime, alcohol, its consumers and consumption and its usually deleterious effects, provide the very essence of the counter-language. Humankind, as T.S. Eliot noted, cannot stand too much reality, and liquor definitely takes the edge off, even if it can take us straight back to sex and crime. Further enquiries for the specifics beer (363), whisk(e)y (221), gin (153), wine (150) and brandy (111) more than double that total. Nearly 1,700 terms, and too many for proper consideration here. Apologies to those who will thus miss their tipple of choice, but let us concentrate on a single group: mixed drinks, for which slang has always had a partiality.
But first, a toast, a word that the unrevised OED tells us first applied to the man or more likely woman toasted, and which took its name from a once popular drink which included a chunk of spiced toast: the woman in question (‘often one who is the reigning belle of the season’) was supposed to flavour the bumper – the brimming glassful that was raised – as did toast in liquor.
Setting aside the various reduplications – chin-chin! pip-pip! honk-honk! – and the variations on Humphrey Bogart’s celebrated here’s looking at you! – here’s looking up your kilt! here’s mud in your eye! – toasts, proclaimed with none but men at table, have often been distinctly sexual. There was the beggar’s benison: ‘may your prick and your purse never fail you!’; inside and outside, that’s ‘inside a cunt and outside a jail’ and the best in Christendom! the missing word again being ‘cunt’; both ends of the busk! celebrates not just the busk, i.e. corset, then of whalebone stiffening, but what was to be found at either end: the breasts and the vagina. There was also Hans-in-kelder, or ‘Jack in the cellar’, which usually meant an as yet unborn foetus.
Other than sex, toasts required that a glass should be drained. Thus put it down! and down the hatch! There were also the cries of no daylights! and no heel-taps! which referred to the filling and emptying of the container. A daylight was a gap left between the top of the poured liquor and the glass; a heel-tap, usually a layer of leather used in making a shoe heel, was anything still drinkable left at the bottom. Neither were acceptable to the dedicated elbow-bender.
Toasts drained, let us commence with some proper names. Aristippus referred to two drinks. The first being Canary wine (produced in the Canary islands), another name for the fortified wine that was known as sack (most likely from Spanish sacar, to draw out, i.e. from the barrel) and subsequently as Malaga or today’s sherry. The second definition is less appealing: a diet drink, made of sarsparilla, cinchona bark (a.k.a. Jesuit’s bark and the basis of quinine) and other ingredients, available at certain coffee houses. Why it was named for Aristippus (c.435–366BCE), a Greek philosopher who founded the rigorously hedonistic Cyrenaic school of philosophy is unknown, though his supposed portrait shows a certain jauntiness. It was presumably a hat-tip from a classically educated age to the school’s basic belief: that pleasure was what counted. And by pleasure they didn’t mean simply the absence of pain, but active, immediate gratification. Physical pleasure, in the here and now; emotional pleasure worked, but lacked that all-important sensuality.
Another liquorous mixture, a hot drink of small beer mixed with brandy, plus lemon juice, spices and sugar, was a Sir Cloudesley. Much loved in the Royal Navy it took its name from that of Sir Cloudesley Shovell (1650–1707), a notable British admiral who was knighted for his suppression of piracy.
Catherine Hayes was a drink made of claret, sugar, nutmeg and orange. The general belief is that the lady in question was an Irish songbird, vastly popular in Australia (where another singer, Nellie Melba, would come to name a foodstuff too). It was Hayes (c.1818–61) who was the first ever singer of ‘Kathleen Mavoureen’, that classic Irish lovesong, in its home town of Dublin. The sweet-voiced soprano was most likely the authoress of the sweet concoction, but there is a possible challenger: an earlier Catherine Hayes (1690–1725) who murdered and dismembered her lover (body parts into a nearby pond, head into the Thames) after deliberately rendering him insensibly drunk. Hayes suffered a more than usually miserable death: sentenced to be burned at the stake, so hot were the flames that the executioner was unable to perform the usual preliminary mercy of killing by strangulation. Instead she only died when a bystander threw a heavy lump of wood, crushing her skull.
The effects of Sneaky Pete (a generic name: there is no known Peter on record as an origin) ‘sneak up’ on the consumer. Best-known as cheap, rotgut wine (rotgut itself covers all sorts of third-rate drinks and goes back to 1597) it has also been used to describe marijuana mixed with wine and, terrifyingly but presumably effectively, a form of spirit distilled from household chemicals. His feminine companion is red Biddy, from Bridget, usually equated with cheap wine. The name can also apply to meths (of which more below), as included by James Joyce in his novel Finnegans Wake when he mentions one Treacle Tom who ‘slept in a nude state, hailfellow with meth [. . .] blotto with divers tots of hell fire, red biddy, bull dog, blue ruin and creeping jenny’. (Blue ruin being gin, as well as applejack or the hangover that follows. None of the others, sadly, have been explained although creeping jenny is elsewhere the plant lysimachia nummularia, known for its aggressive colonisation of all available soil.)
Proper names aside, there are also geographical links. For instance Brummagem wine: any adulterated or mixed drink. This, with its negative stereotyping of Birmingham, is an extension of the older form, Bromicham: ‘particularly noted a few years ago, for the counterfeit groats made here, and from hence dispersed all over the Kingdom’.
Australia offers a pair of off-brand uses of champagne, none of which much resemble the French original. For Northern Territory or bush champagne, stereotyped with racist glee as a favourite tipple among Native Australians, see below. The country also served the Domain cocktail, a mixture of petrol and pepper allegedly once popular among Domain dossers or down-and-outs, in the Sydney Domain, a city park which was popular for speech-making and frequented by the unemployed and the alcoholic.
A King’s peg was a champagne cocktail that mixes champagne with brandy. The King is self-evident and its date suggests that the monarch in question was Edward VII. Edward also modified the usual recipe, substituting whisky for the brandy and adding Maraschino and angostura to create his own ‘Prince of Wales cocktail’. As for peg, this either moralises on the idea that each drink was one more peg, i.e. nail, in the drinker’s coffin, or takes us back to the seventeenth century’s tankards, wherein the peg referred to ‘one of a set of pins fixed at intervals in a drinking vessel as marks to measure the quantity which each drinker was to drink’ (OED).
Finally, and perhaps inevitably, a pun: a war cry, a mixture of stout and mild ale, played on the Salvation Army newspaper The War Cry and the belief that while the Army spoke ‘stoutly’ it used only ‘mild’ terms.
No one pretended that this stuff didn’t have a kick: wasn’t that the point? Rough whisky might be spill-skull, bust-skull, pop-skull, swell-skull and swell head. Australia offered blow-my-skull-off, which mixed wine, opium, cayenne pepper and rum; it doubtless did just that and was much prized at the mid-nineteenth-century gold diggings; an alternative recipe mixed boiling water, sugar, lime or lem
on juice, porter, rum and brandy. A shake-up was a form of cocktail, made from a variety of liquors, plus wine.
After which, one needed a corpse reviver, another non-specific mixed drink, tossed back in the hope of curing a hangover. It was usually listed among typical mid-nineteenth-century ‘American drinks’, all luridly innovative to the visiting Brits. There was even a comic song, ‘The American Drinks’, created by the music-hall star Arthur Lloyd (1840–1904): ‘I suppose you’ve all tasted American drinks at one time or other,’ he asked his audience, ‘curious names they have tho’. For instance there’s . . .
A stone-fence, a rattlesnake, a renovator, locomotive,
Pick-me-up, or private-smile, by Jove is worth a fiver
A Colleen Bawn, a lady’s blush, a cocktail, or a flash of lightning
Juleps, smashes, sangarees, or else a corpse reviver.’
The song climaxes with his consuming the lot.
These can mostly be ‘translated’, whether or not they were really available on this side of the Pond. Cocktail (the word may be common, its etymology is still unresolved and may reflect the cocked or docked tails of horses considered inferior to full-on thoroughbreds, thus a mixed drink was similarly déclassé) and julep (from the Spanish julepe and ultimately the Persian golâb, rose-water) are standard English. Sangaree was properly spiced wine, diluted with water (ultimately Spain’s sangria) in slang meaning not a drink but a drinking bout. The locomotive was a winter drink made of Burgundy, curaçao, egg yolks, honey and cloves all heated together; the stone fence or stone-wall was either whisky or some other spirit mixed with cider or ginger-beer and brandy (whether the effect of the ‘wall’ was to stop you in your tracks, or perhaps to fall on you, is unresolved); a whiskey skin was any mixed drink that contained a large proportion of whisky. The rattlesnake presumably ‘bit’ the drinker (and had a ‘sting in its tail’) while the renovator and pick-me-up mimicked the corpse reviver.
A smile, fancy smile or private smile either promoted a smile through the sheer pleasure of its consumption or represented the ‘smile’ that was formed by lips open for drinking; it covered any drink, though whisky was the usual, and was found in do a smile, have a drink, and the invitation, will you try a smile? A smiler, logically, was a drinker, as well as a form of shandygaff, a mixture of beer and ginger beer or stout and lemonade. A flash of lightning (see further below) began life in London as a glass of gin, but with its synonyms blue lightning, lightning juice and liquid lightning, for Americans it represented whisky or any form of cheap, strong liquor. Smash, from brandy-smash, was iced brandy and water.
Pink drinks, being seen as ‘girly’, attracted female names. Thus the lady’s or maiden’s blush (occasionally maiden’s prayers) which involved either port and lemonade or, in Australia, ginger beer and raspberry cordial. Australia added the barmaid’s blush which is ginger beer or rum plus raspberry cordial. It can also be a cocktail based on champagne or, again, the British favourite port and lemon. Unlisted, but contemporary, was flesh-and-blood, a loose approximation of the colours of the drinks, composed of equal measures of port and brandy.
Last in the lyrics, Colleen Bawn. Slang knows no liquorous definition. The name, the anglicised version of Irish cailínbán, the white or fair woman, was used for the heroine of the opera ‘The Lily of Killarney’, first produced in 1862 at the Royal English Opera, Covent Garden, London. It was quickly adopted by rhyming slang and means a horn, an erection. This may suggest some sniggering link to cock-tail, but then again, perhaps not.
Still musical, and a century on, we meet spodiodi or bolly-olly, defined by Jack Kerouac as ‘a shot of port wine, a shot of whiskey and a shot of port wine’, the sweet port playing the role of a ‘jacket’ for the whisky. The port tended to be cheap, and the whisky whatever generic version the bar was selling. The drink was much consumed by jazz musicians and beatniks and in 1949 inspired Stick McGhee’s song ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee.’ McGhee’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the original lyric ran ‘Drinkin’ wine motherfucker, drinkin’ wine!’
The young may lack finesse, but they know what they want. Obliteration. There are ways of achieving this, borne out in the names of the juvenile cocktails. Rocket fuel, a New Zealand mix which blends alcohol and a soft drink in a plastic bottle; the intent is presumably for the weak one to hide the strong. Snakebite began life as cheap but potent whisky and moved on to the modern mix of cider and lager; it can also mean a ‘cocktail’ of heroin and morphine. (The wider-ranging cider-and is any form of mixed drink in which the basic constituent is cider.) An anaconda is a mixture of strong beer and rough cider or scrumpy. Less in-your-face, even euphemistic, is the frat boys’ party juice, a cocktail of liquids including an unspecified alcohol content, typically served at fraternity parties.
Given the variety of ingredients, it is hard to isolate flavours, but a number of slang’s favourites must have been notably sweet. Thus the bishop, supposedly an episcopal delight, a mixture of wine and water, topped off by a roasted orange. Australia’s Madame Bishop combined port, sugar and nutmeg, but the suggested link to an Australian hotel-keeper is probably specious. Cherry-bounce, named for its effects, was either cherry brandy or brandy mixed with sugar; blackjack was rum sweetened with molasses (as well as very strong black coffee, again plus molasses, or illegally distilled whisky). The earliest blackjack, around 1600, was a vessel for liquor (either for holding it or for drinking from) which was made of waxed leather coated on its outside with tar or pitch.
Flip or phlip, both based on standard English flip, to whip up, was a mixture of beer and spirit sweetened with sugar into which one plunged a red-hot iron; hot tiger, an Oxford University speciality, mixed hot spiced ale and sherry (tiger’s milk, however is illicitly distilled whiskey). Humpty-dumpty was another hot drink (despite the suggestion of falling, from walls or elsewhere, the name is based on the ‘humping together’ of the two liquors) made of ale and brandy boiled together. Bumbo, possibly based on Italian children’s use of bombo for drink, is brandy, sugar and water while rumbo, logically, substitutes rum for the brandy. Still with brandy one finds hotpot, a hot drink made of ale and brandy, and conny wobble, eggs and brandy beaten up together. This cries out for an etymology but cony, a fool, hardly fits (nor does a standard English cony, a rabbit), while collywobbles, feelings of tension, fear or sickness, was coined a century later. Callibogus similarly demands a concrete origin; once again, this mix of rum and spruce beer defies the researcher.
Beer, already found in a number of mixtures, has other terms, mostly negative. Balderdash, long since used to mean nonsense, was once any adulterated or mixed drink, typically milk and beer, beer and wine, brandy and mineral water, which, while duly consumed, was generally considered unpleasant. All senses come from the sixteenth-century balderdash, frothy water. The origin of this appears to be Scandinavian, whether in Danish balder, noise or clatter, Norwegian bjaldra, to speak indistinctly, or Icelandic baldras, to make a clatter. The dash comes from Danish daske, to slap or flap. The Welsh baldorddus, noisy, from baldordd, idle, noisy talk, chatter, may also play a role. An alternative etymology has been suggested (and backed up by a sixteenth-century reference to ‘barbers balderdash’) as coming from the froth and foam made by barbers in dashing their balls (spherical pieces of soap) backwards and forwards in hot water.
Bilgewater is a straight steal from standard English bilgewater, the foul water that collects in a vessel’s bilges. For slang it means thin beer and beyond that any thin, tasteless drink, alcoholic or otherwise, although a mid-nineteenth-century example only denotes a mixed drink, not a weak one. Francis Grose offered three ingredients: ‘half common ale, mixed with stale and double beer’; it sounds unappetising. Another lexicographer, Hotten has heavy wet and defines it as ‘malt liquor, because the more a man drinks of it, the heavier and more stupid he becomes’; it can also mean a heavy drinking bout, a mixture of porter and beer (also heavy cheer) and non-alcoholically, a downpour, a rainstorm.
&nbs
p; It is arguable as to whether the drinks that were produced during America’s 1920s temperance experiment, Prohibition, best remembered for its institutionalisation of organised crime, strictly qualify as ‘mixed’. On the other hand, their constituents were rarely what they claimed, e.g. ‘whiskey’. Bathtub hooch reflected the bathtub in which it was supposedly made (though it may also have tasted like dirty bathwater) and hooch had begun life as hoochinoo, an alcoholic liquor made by Alaskan Indians, especially the Hoochinoo people. Hooch survived prohibition: it can just mean liquor, even the good stuff, which at the time was known as the quill (from the pure quill, which had meant something flawless since the 1880s) or the real A.V., that is ante-Volstead: before Prohibition’s legal launch, the Volstead Act of 1920. Otherwise there was coffin varnish, alcohol’s equivalent to tobacco’s coffin nail, or monkey swill. A camouflage cocktail was any mix that might hide the poor-quality liquor of the era. Or there was cougar juice, which has been part-adopted by US skiers in ‘Cougar Milk’, a blend of condensed milk, rum, nutmeg and boiling water, originally known as ‘moose milk’. Two-and-over suggests a drink of which after two shots the drinker collapses; a ‘cousin’, perhaps of block-and-fall, very strong and usually adulterated liquor sold, usually to African Americans, in block and fall joints: ‘you’d get a shock, walk a block and fall in the gutter’ as the critic and historian Luc Sante has put it. At which point the local vultures stripped your pockets.
Prison, supposedly free of all intoxicants, is of course a veritable liquor store of home-brews. On the top shelf stands pruno, which suggests a one-time base of prunes, and which ‘classic prison drink’ is described thus in the prisoner’s dictionary, The Other Side of the Wall (2000): ‘It is made by putting fruit juice, fruit, fruit peelings in a plastic bag with bread and/or sugar. The yeast in the bread along with the sugar helps ferment the fruit juice, fruit, or peelings. The plastic bag is usually placed down the toilet and secured so that it is not detected.’ Other prison creations include julep, the contents of which are unlikely to be those in the term that originated it, the (mint) julep, ‘a mixture of brandy, whisky, or other spirit, with sugar and ice and some flavouring, usually mint.’ Other vegetable-based concoctions include spud juice (potatoes), silo, shinny and New Zealand’s hokonui.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 21