The Vocabulary of the Drinking Chamber by H. L. Mencken
(New Yorker Magazine; Nov. 6, 1948)
Bartenders, as a class, are probably the most adept practical psychologists on earth, but they have never given much attention to purely humanistic studies, as, for example, semantics. One result is that their professional argot is pretty meager; indeed, it might reasonably be described as infirm. At least ninety-five per cent of them, in speaking of the tools and materia of their craft, use the threadbare words of every day. A glass, to them, is simply a glass , a bung starter is a bung starter , a bouncer is a bouncer , rye whiskey is rye , a cocktail is a cocktail , gin is gin , and so on ad finem . There are, to be sure, occasional Winchells among them, but no such Winchell has ever concocted anything to raise the hackles of a linguistic pathologist. When they call a garrulous client an auctioneer , or a souse a trance , he barely flutters an eyelid, nor does he find much to lift him in squirt gun for a Seltzer siphon, sham for a glass with a false bottom, stick for the handle of a beer spigot, or comb for the instrument that slices off the supererogatory suds from a stoup of beer. Even copâs bottle for the worst whiskey in the house seems to him to be close to the obvious; what else, indeed, could it be called? College boys, in their opprobrious names for their books, their professors, and the females who prey upon them, have developed a great many niftier and hotter words, and railroad men, to cite only one group of workingmen, have invented so rich and bizarre a vocabulary that it transcends the poor jargon of the booze slingers as the spiral nebula in Andromeda transcends the flash of a match.
A good way to discover the paucity of bartendersâ neologistic powers is to ask yourself what they call themselves. Have they ever invented a fancy name comparable to the mortician of the undertakers, the realtor of the real-estate jobbers, the ecdysiast of the strip teasers, or the cosmetologist of the beautĂŠ-shoppĂŠ gals? Alas, they have not, and it seems very unlikely that they ever will. Even so silly a term as mixologist was devised not by a practicing bartender but by some forgotten journalist writing in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1856. He intended it sportively and it has remained on that level ever since, along with colonel for a whiskey drummer and professor for a kneader of pugilists. In 1901, the Police Gazette , then at the apex of its educational influence, attempted to revive and glorify mixologist , but the effort failed miserably, and bar clerk was soon substituted, and likewise failed. Barman , borrowed from the English, has been put forward from time to time, and there used to be an International Barmen Association in New York, but I can no longer find it in the Manhattan telephone book, and its former spot is now held by the International Bartenders School, on Forty-sixth Street, which has a Yale for its Harvard in the Bartenders School, Inc., on Forty-ninth Street. Both have excellent reputations in scholastic circles. All the existing unions in the profession, so far as I have been able to track them down, use plain bartender in their titles, and so do the various social clubs, choral societies, and leagues against prohibition and Communism. Some time ago, Oscar Haimo , of the Hotel Pierre, described himself as mâitre de bar in the advertising of his latest book, âCocktail and Wine Digest,â but I have yet to hear a second for it. Nor is there any visible support for server , which made its dĂŠbut in New Jersey late in 1910 and seems to have died the death by January 1, 1911 . Forgetting the vulgar barkeeper and barkeep , only bartender survives, a lowly word but a sound one. It arose from unknown sources during the Gothic Age of American boozing, c , 1855, and is of purely American genesis, though the English now toy with it. So is barroom , which was used by John Adams in 1807. And so is bar (the room, not the service counter), which was first heard of in 1788. The English barmaid has never caught on in this country; perhaps it suggests too strongly the poetic but smelly milkmaid . There are many females behind our more democratic bars, and I know one in Baltimore who is a first-rate artist, but if you called her a barmaid , she would crown you with the copâs bottle.
The failure of the bartenders to enrich the vocabulary of their art and mystery is matched by the reluctance of professional philologians to investigate the terms already existing. This reluctance, of course, may be due to the fact that booze studies are frowned upon on most college campuses, and hence bring no promotion to the ambitious pedagogue; also, there may be something in the fact that men learned in the tongues commonly carry their liquor badly, and sometimes have to be sent home from their annual pow -wows in charge of trained nurses. Whatever the truth about this, it remains a matter of record that they have done next to nothing to clear up the etymologies of boozology and that the origins of many of our salient drinking termsâfor example, cocktail , Mickey Finn , and
highball â are quite as dark as the origins of the things themselves. In this emergency, as might be expected, a great many amateurs have thrown themselves into the breach, and the result is a mass of surmise and speculation that gives the scientific student a lot of pain. I have in my archives perhaps forty or fifty such etymologies for cocktail , but can only report sadly that nearly all of them are no more than baloney. The most plausible that I have encountered was launched by Stanley Clisby Arthur, author of âFamous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix Them ,â a classical work. It is to the effect that the cocktail was invented, along about 1800, by Antoine AmĂŠdĂŠe Peychaud , a refugee from Santo Domingo who operated a New Orleans pharmacy in the Rue Royale.This Peychaud was a Freemason, and his bretheren in the craft took to dropping in at his drugstore after their lodge meetings. A hospitable fellow, he regaled them with a toddy made of French brandy, sugar, water, and a bitters of a secret formula, brought from Santo Domingo . Apparently running short of toddy glasses, he served this mixture in double-ended eggcups, called, in French, â coquetiers .â The true pronunciation of the word was something on the order of â ko - kayt - yay ,â but his American friends soon mangled it to â cock - tay â and then to â cocktail .â The composition of the bitters he used remained secret, and they are known as Peychaudâs to this day. His brandy came from the Sazerac du Forge et Fils distillery at Limoges , and its name survives in the Sazerac cocktail, though this powerful drug is now usually made of rye whiskey, with the addition of Peychaudâs bitters, absinthe, lemon peel, and sugar.
As I have said, this etymology has more plausibility than most, and Iâd like to believe it, if only to ease my mind, but some obvious question marks follow it. First, why didnât Arthur give his authorities? It is hard to believe that he remembered back to 1800 himself and if there were intervening chroniclers, then why didnât he name them? And if he got his facts from original documentsâsay, in the old Cabildo âthen why didnât he supply titles, dates, and pages? A greater difficulty lies in the fact that the searchers for the âDictionary of American Englishâ unearthed a plain mention of the cocktail in the Hudson (N. Y.) Balance for May 13, 1806 , in which it was defined as â a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.â How did Peychaudâs
invention , if it was his invention, make its way from New Orleans to so remote a place as Hudson , New York , in so short a time, and how did it become generalized on the way? At the start of its journey it was a concoction of very precise compositionâas much so as the Martini or Manhattan of todayâbut in a very few years it was popping up more than a thousand miles away, with an algebraic formula:
x + C 12 H 22 O 11 + H 2 O + y
That can be developed, by substitution, into almost countless other formulas, all of them making authentic cocktails. Given any hard liquor, any diluent , and any addition of aromatic flavoring, and you have one instantly. What puzzles me is how this massive fact, so revolutionary in human history and so conducive to human happiness, jumped so quickly from New Orleans to the Hudson Valley . It seems much more likely that the cocktail was actually known and esteemed in the Albany region some time before Peychaud shook up his first Sazerac on the lower Mississippi . But, lacking precise proof to this effect, I am glad to give that Mousterian soda jerker full faith and credit, and to greet him with huzzas for his service to humanity.
Cocktails are now so numerous that no bartender, however talented, can remember how to make all of them, or even the half of them. In the âSavoy Cocktail Book,â published in 1930, the number listed is nearly seven hundred, and in the âBartenderâs Guide,â by Trader Vic, published in 1947, it goes beyond sixteen hundred. No man short of a giant could try them all, and nine-tenths of them, I believe, would hardly be worth trying. The same sound instinct that prompts the more enlightened minority of mankind to come in out of a thunderstorm has also taught it to confine its day-in-and-day-out boozing to about a dozen standard varietiesâthe Martini , the Manhattan , the Daiquiri , the Side Car , the Orange Blossom , the Alexander , the Bronx , and a few others. The lexicographer John Russell Bartlett, in the fourth edition of his âDictionary of Americanisms,â 1877, also listed the Jerseyand the Japanese , but neither survives except in the bartendersâ guides, which no bartender ever reads. The âDictionary of American Englishâ traces the Manhattan only to 1894, but that is absurd, for I saw a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States drink one in a Washington barroom in 1886. The others that I have mentioned, save the Martini and the Bronx, are not listed in any dictionary at hand, though millions of them go down the esophagi of one-hundred-per-cent Americans every week, and maybe every day. A correspondent tells me that the Daiquiri was invented by American engineers marooned at Daiquiri, near Santiago de Cuba , in 1898; they ran out of whiskey and gin but found a large supply of pale Cuban rum, and got it down by mixing it with lime juice. The origin of the Martini is quite unknown to science, though I have heard the suggestion that its name comes from that of Martin Luther. The origins of Bronxditto; all that is known is that it preceded the Bronx Cheer . The origins of the Alexander ditto, despite some fancy theories. The Old-Fashioned is supposed to be the grandfather of them all, and it really may be, for its formula greatly resembles that of the Hudson Balance cocktail of 1806, but the fact remains that Bartlett did not mention it in 1877 and that it is not to be found in any earlier reference works, not even the Congressional Globe , predecessor of the Congressional Record .
Some time ago, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , a high-toned paper, dug up a local historian who testified that the highball was named by Lilburn McNair, a grandson of the first governor of Missouri and a shining light of St. Louis bar society in the nineties. It seems to be true that the name was first heard about that time, for highball was never applied before to a mixture of rye or bourbon and soda or tap water, and Scotch whiskey did not come upon the American market until the early nineties. (My father, trying his first shot of it in 1894, carried on in a violent manner, and died, four years later, believing that it was made by quack saloonkeepers in their cellars, of creosote and sweet spirits of nitre .) But there are old-timers in Boston who say that the first highball was shoved across the bar at the Parker House there, and the late Patrick Gavin Duffy, an eminent bartender of New York, claimed in his âThe Official Mixerâs Manualâ that he borned it at the old Ashland House in 1895. Why the name? Most of the authorities say that it arose from the fact that the bartenders of the nineties called a glass a ball and that highball flowed naturally from the fact that what was formerly a whiskey-and-soda needed a taller glass than a straight whiskey. But all the bartenders above eighty that I am acquainted with say that ball was never used for a glass. Other authorities report that highball was lifted from the railroad men, who use the term for go ahead. But this sounds pretty thin, for if the railroad men of that era had ever detected a bartender putting water (and especially soda water) into whiskey, they would have butchered him on the spot. Thus the matter stands. I pant for light, but there is no light.
The history of Mickey Finn is equally murky. Herbert Asbury says, in his âGem of the Prairie,â a history of the rise of culture in Chicago , that the name was borrowed from that of a Chicago saloonkeeper who had been a lush-roller in his early days and operated a college for pickpockets in connection with his saloon. The patrons of the place were a somewhat mischievous lot, and not infrequently Finn had to go to the aid of his bouncer. They used the side arms in vogue at the timeâto wit, bung starters, shillelaghs, joints of gas pipe, and lengths of garden hose filled with BB shotâbut the work was laborious, and Finn longed for something sneakier and slicker. One day, a colored swami named Hall offered to mix him a dose that would knock out the friskiest patient in a few minutes. The formula turned out to be half an ounce of chloral hydrate in a double slug of pseudo-whiskey. It worked so well that many of those to whom it was given landed in the morgue, and Finn was so pleased with it that he gave it his name. I have a very high opinion of Asburyâs lexicographical and sociological parts, but I am still waiting to hear him explain how Mickey Finn became transferred from a dose comparable to an atomic bomb to a drink of bathtub gin with a drop or two of croton oil in itâa mixture that certainly got rid of the customer but did him no more permanent harm than a draught of Glauberâs salts. Also, I am waiting to hear from him why a Chicago saloonkeeper had to wait for a colored necromancer to tell him about knockout drops , which had been familiar in American criminal circles since the first Grant administration. My own great-uncle, Julius by name, got a massive shot of them in Wheeling , West Virginia , in 1870, and was never the same man afterward.
These few examples reveal the pitfalls, booby traps, and other difficulties that strew the path of anyone seriously interested in the origin and history of booze terms. The dictionaries, always prissy, avoid most of them as they avoid the immemorial four-letter words. You will not find Mickey Finn in the great Webster of 1934, or in the âDictionary of American English,â or in the âSupplement to the New English Dictionary.â It appears,
to be sure, in some of the newer and smaller dictionaries, but almost always with the equivocal definition of âa drugged drink.â So far as I have been able to discover, only âWords: The New Dictionary,â brought out in 1947, says that its essential medicament is a cathartic, not a narcotic. Even Berrey and Van den Bark, in their invaluable âAmerican Thesaurus of Slang,â 1942, are content to list it under the rubric of strong liquor , along with forty - rod , pop - skull , and third rail , though I should add that they note that tramps and criminals now use it to designate any laxative victual. Highball is listed in nearly all the dictionaries published since 1930, but not one of them attempts its etymology. Nor does any of them try to unravel the mystery of cocktail .
