Chapter 17

Drinking

As soon as the performance has concluded, it’s time to head out for a drink or two at a local bar, hostelry, or pub (an abbreviation of public house). Terms for those who frequent drinking dens were often evocatively descriptive, such as swill-bowl, spigot-sucker, rinse-pitcher, and gulch-cup—all of which describe the process of emptying a drinking vessel. The word toss-pot, now a general term of abuse, was initially a name for a drunkard, referring to the tendency to toss off, that is, tilt back and thereby empty, the pot containing drink. Terms drawing on classical roots sound less disreputable; these include potator, the Latin term for a drinker (from potare ‘to drink’), polyposist, from a Greek word meaning ‘hard drinker’, and son of Bacchus—the Roman name for the god of wine known to the Greeks as Dionysus. Less convivial company is the shot-clog—a sixteenth-century term for an unwelcome drinking companion who is tolerated simply because he pays the bill at the end of the evening. In the eighteenth century, someone who was frequently drunk was known as a lush; in the nineteenth century they could be termed a Lushington. This is from a society of that name that convened at the Harp Tavern on Russell Street, with an appointed Lord Mayor and four aldermen, who controlled the wards known as Juniper, Poverty, Lunacy, and Suicide.

Now in the company of your fellow-drinkers, or ale-knights, it is time to sample a favourite beverage (going back to Latin bibere ‘to drink’), or tipple. Tipple was originally tippler, someone who sold rather than drank alcohol, perhaps from a regional Norwegian word tipla ‘to drip slowly’. Booze is one of a small number of words borrowed into English from Dutch in the Middle Ages; it comes from a word meaning ‘to drink deeply’, related to buise, the name of a large drinking cup. Beer and ale are both derived from Old English, while lager is from German Lagerbier, a term that describes beer that has been brewed to be kept, from the German word Lager ‘storehouse’. The dark bitter known as porter is so called because it was originally made for porters, whose duties involved carrying—hence their name, from Latin portare ‘to carry’. This is the source of the French verb porter, which can also mean ‘to wear’—hence prêt-à-porter ‘ready to wear’, used of clothes bought off the peg as opposed to made to measure. The Latin word for a cask, or a wineskin, buttis, lies behind the English word bottle; it also survives in the word butt, the term still used for a cask in which wine or beer is stored, and in butler. The French word for a butler, sommelier, is now used in posh restaurants for the waiter in charge of wine orders.

Before drinking it is traditional to raise a glass, or drink a toast—naming someone in whose honour, or to whose health, the drink is dedicated. The formula ‘Here’s to X’ can be traced back to the seventeenth century—it is first recorded in Romeo and Juliet—although since the glass Romeo raises to Juliet contains poison, it’s not the most auspicious beginning to the tradition. If you can’t think of anyone to dedicate the drink to, or if there’s no one suitable among the assembled drinkers, the safest bet is to plump for absent friends. Although the similarity may not be obvious, the toast you drink is related to the toast you eat: the connection being that the former originated in the idea that raising a glass to a particular lady flavoured the contents in a similar way as the spiced toast that was added to drinks in the eighteenth century. As an alternative, you could fall back on Cheers: the plural of cheer, expressing a wish for cheerfulness and good spirits. In the Middle Ages the appropriate toast was Wassail, a salutation borrowed from the Danish Vikings who settled in Britain. The word derives from the Old Norse ves heill—the equivalent of the Old English wes hal ‘be in good health’. The correct response—should you ever find yourself drinking with a Viking—is Drinkhail ‘drink good health’. The word wassail was also used to refer to the spiced ale drunk at Twelfth Night and Christmas, and then to all kinds of general revelry—as in Hamlet’s reference to the king’s keeping wassail and draining his draughts of Rhenish—a wine produced in the region surrounding the Rhine.

Another toast borrowed from the Scandinavian languages is skol, adopted in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and derived from the Old Norse skal ‘bowl’. In the nineteenth century the Gaelic Sláinte, meaning ‘health’, became popular in Scotland and Ireland. The French word for health, santé, also used as a drinking toast, has been recorded in English since the beginning of the twentieth century. From German, English also borrowed the exclamation Prosit (or prost); despite its Germanic extraction, this word has its origins in a Latin word meaning ‘may it benefit’. From Anglo-Chinese we get the toast Chin chin, originating in Chinese ts’ing ts’ing. More exotic variants coined in the 1920s include Here’s to the skin off your nose and Here’s mud in your eye, used by the likes of Bertie Wooster and even Jeeves, albeit with an appropriate unease as to the decorum: ‘Skin off your nose, Jeeves.’ ‘Mud in your eye, sir, if I may use the expression.’

Drink

Alcohol is from the Arabic al-kuhl, the name given to a powder used as a cosmetic, especially for darkening the eyes. In later applications it referred to an essence formed by the process of distillation, from which its modern use derived. Wine is an early loanword from Latin vinum, probably borrowed by the Angles and Saxons when they came into contact with Roman soldiers, even before the invasion of Britain. The Greek word for wine, oinos, gives us oenomania, which can mean both ‘a passion for wine’ and a ‘craving for alcohol’—a helpful ambiguity that suggests either a wine buff or a drunkard. Dipsomania may be more euphemistic in its original Greek etymology—it literally means ‘thirst madness’—but its English use is considerably blunter, being defined simply as ‘alcoholism’.

Champagne is titled after the wine-producing region in eastern France where it is made, which in turn takes its name from the Latin campania ‘level country’ (from campus ‘field’). At the other end of the scale of price and sophistication is plonk—originally an Australian slang term derived from vin blanc ‘white wine’. Also originating in a description of its colour is the word claret, which is from the Old French vin claret ‘clear wine’—initially used to refer to a light wine. It was only later that claret came to refer to red wines in general, and then specifically those produced in the Bordeaux region. Also named for its appearance is the Spanish drink sangria, in which red wine is blended with lemonade and fruit, which translates as ‘bleeding’.

Another source of names for alcoholic beverages are their places of origin. Thus port is so called because it was imported from the Portuguese port of Oporto. Sherry is from Spanish vino de Xeres, wine of Xeres (the older name for Jerez)—the ‘x’ having initially been pronounced ‘sh’. This was initially adopted into English as sherris; because this word was mistakenly understood to be plural, the singular form sherry was born.

When gin was introduced into England in the seventeenth century, it was erroneously believed to have been produced in the city of Geneva—leading to a folk-etymological form geneva. But gin in fact originates in the Dutch word genever, from Latin juniperus ‘juniper’, since juniper berries were used to flavour the spirit. The eighteenth century witnessed the establishment of the gin shop and the gin house, a public house that specialized in selling gin, and sometimes also produced it. By the nineteenth century these had been joined by the gin palace, a larger establishment that was typically gaudily and ostentatiously decorated. Gin and tonic was first introduced to the British through the army in India; the idea behind the concoction was to make it easier for the soldiers to take the quinine in the soda, which was a preventative treatment for malaria.

Often drunk for its supposed medicinal properties, whisky is a contraction of whiskybae, a rendering in English of the Gaelic uisgebeatha ‘water of life’. Today whisky is the Scots spelling while whiskey is Irish, but this is an artificial distinction introduced by the whisk(e)y industry. The word uisce is related to the English equivalent water; both go back to a root that is also preserved in Latin unda ‘wave’, from which we get inundated. Another spirit whose name is connected with the word for water is Russian vodka, which is simply the diminutive form of voda ‘water’.

Spirits mixed with water are known as grog—a term that originally referred to rum that had been watered down. The name is taken from Old Grog, the nickname of Admiral Vernon, who was the first to instruct that the rum served to sailors be diluted with water. His nickname is taken from his habit of wearing a cloak made from grogram, a fabric whose name is drawn from the French gros grain ‘coarse grain’. Adding too much water to a drink is known as drowning the miller, or putting the miller’s eye out—also used of putting too much water into the dough when baking bread.

If you want to avoid getting drunk, all you need to do is drop an amethyst in your drink. The word amethyst comes from Greek amethustos ‘not drunken’, a name which originated in the belief that the connection between the colour of the stone and that of red wine would prevent a drinker from becoming intoxicated. But if you’ve left your protective amethyst at home, it’s possible you are beginning to feel a little tipsy—from tip over, referring to an inability to walk or stand upright. Or perhaps a more appropriate epithet would be one of the numerous English terms for being drunk. These include cooking terms likening the drunkard to one who has been pickled, or stewed (to the ears, eyebrows, or gills) in alcohol, alongside sloshed, sozzled, tight, and half-cut. More formal, though typically used with mock-seriousness, is inebriated, from Latin ebrius ‘drunk’, or the euphemistic tired and emotional.

Another way of expressing the level of drunkenness is by means of a simile—English is suitably well stocked with examples. While you may be familiar with drunk as a lord or the rhyming drunk as a skunk, there are a number of less well-known examples, including drunk as a mouse, drunk as a rat (from which we get ratted and rat-arsed), drunk as a beggar, drunk as a fiddler, and drunk as a wheelbarrow—the last of these presumably a reference to the difficulty of maintaining a straight line when pushing this three-wheeled cart, especially when heavily laden. Sturdy may appear to have little in common with these inebriated animals, but its etymon, the Old French word esturdi ‘dazed’, may be derived ultimately from Latin turdus ‘thrush’, recalling the unsteady manner with which thrushes walk after eating grapes that have been partially fermented. In French a drunkard may be described as soûl comme une grive: ‘drunk as a thrush’.

If you have really overindulged you may find yourself whipping the cat, flaying the fox, praying to the porcelain goddess, or talking to Ralph on the big white telephone. These are just some of the more unusual recorded idioms referring to being sick, vomiting (from Latin vomo ‘I am sick’), or—more euphemistically—losing one’s dinner. The word vomit also appears in vomitorium, the name of the room to which Romans were reputed to retire after an evening’s excessive eating and drinking in order to be sick. But this is a twentieth-century myth; in reality a vomitorium was the passage that led into an amphitheatre by which members of the audience would enter and exit—this use of the word meaning ‘pass out’ rather than ‘be sick’.

All of this heavy drinking may lead to a hangover. The classic hangover cure known as the hair of the dog—essentially an invitation to carry on drinking, thereby postponing rather than curing the suffering—is a shortened version of the hair of the dog that bit you. This saying arose during the sixteenth century, when it was believed that the best way to treat a dog bite was to apply hair taken from the same animal that inflicted the wound. This was the advice offered to Samuel Pepys after a night’s heavy drinking and which, despite reservations, he found to be effective in relieving his pounding head: ‘at noon dined with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who would needs have me drink two drafts of sack to-day to cure me of last night’s disease, which I thought strange, but I think find it true.’ Of course it may be that you are not a big drinker, or perhaps even teetotal. This term for someone who abstains entirely from alcohol originates in the temperance movement of the nineteenth century. In order to stress the importance of total abstinence, the first letter was repeated; hence: T-Total.

Either way, it is that time of night when you might be tempted to risk a visit to a local nightclub or discothèque. Now more common in its abbreviated form disco, this word was coined on the model of the French word bibliothèque ‘library’, and was originally used of a record library. An American slang term for a nightclub, from the African-American creole term juke ‘disorderly’, is the origin of the juke box. But in a nightclub you don’t have any choice over the music; instead you are at the mercy of the disc jockey. This may seem like an odd conjunction, since jockeys are associated with riding horses rather than spinning discs. The explanation lies in the history of the word jockey, which began life as a variant of the personal name Jack—meaning ‘lad’ or ‘bloke’—and was subsequently applied to those whose profession involves riding a horse—couriers and postillions, for example. A later extension saw it refer to labourers engaged in driving and maintaining other forms of transport, such as garage jockeys, trolley jockeys, and motor jockeys. From this, a further widening led to the birth of the disc jockey, or DJ.

On the dance floor you may attempt to jive, originally a dance performed to jazz music. If you are feeling especially confident, you might decide to attempt a tango; you’ll need to identify a willing partner, of course, since it takes two to tango—a phrase that emphasizes shared responsibility in a particular situation. The word tango looks as if it should be from Latin, since tango means ‘I touch’, preserved in tangible, but in fact it is thought to be of African origin. The flamenco dance takes its name from the Spanish word for ‘Fleming’, used here in the sense ‘gypsy-like’. It’s unclear how this dance acquired an association with gypsies; it may be from uses of the word to mean ‘jaunty’ and ‘attractive’. The usual Spanish term for Gypsy is gitano, which originated in a word meaning ‘Egyptian’; the same origin lies behind the English word Gypsy, or Gyptian as it was originally (the form adopted by Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials). The reason behind this name is that the Romany people were popularly believed to have originated in Egypt. In fact the Romany, whose language is a form of Hindi, are natives of South Asia. The dance known as the tarantella is connected to the tarantula (named after the southern Italian town of Taranto) since it was thought to be a cure for tarantism—a psychological illness, understood to be caused by a bite from the spider, in which the sufferer experienced an extreme urge to dance.