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Volume 10, Issue 7, March 27, 2008
by Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan
© 2008 Reganomics, Inc.
Cheap Date: Grog: The Last Drop
| Cheap Date |  |
Grog: Good Till The Last Drop
In our continuing quest to do less and less work, our Cheap Date this week is stolen from Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter. Well, okay, we didn't actually steal it--we asked for, and received, permission from Michael. He's a generous chappie. And we love his newsletter. So, in accordance to his wishes, we are telling you that World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
World Wide Words doesn't cover drinks all the time, but when Mr. Quinion sinks his teeth into any word at all, you can count on him doing a very thorough job, so we thought we'd bring you his work on the origins of the word grog from his March 15 issue.
Q&A: Grog
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Q. My twin brother recently brought back from an arduous medical congress on Grenada a splendid bottle of rum, which bore an equally splendid story that the origin of the name of the daily ration of "grog" served to British seamen was to be found in that island, and was derived from the brand with which the casks were marked, namely GROG, or Georgius Rex Old Grenada. The George in question is said to be George III. Does this story hold any water? [Michael Hocken]
A. No. Nor rum either. However, the real story sounds even less likely, though the experts are pretty much convinced it is true.
Parts of the bottle's tale are correct, though. The ration of rum mixed with water that was once served to sailors on board British warships was indeed called grog. And the rum did come from the West Indies - the custom of serving it instead of other strong spirits such as brandy began in 1687, following the British capture of Jamaica.
In 1740, Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon was commanding officer of the British naval forces in the West Indies during the conflict with Spain that was weirdly named the War of Jenkins' Ear, after a captain who in 1731 had had an ear cut off in a skirmish with the Spanish. Vernon was so concerned about the bad effects of the rum ration on his sailors that in August that year he issued an order that in future the rum ration was to be served diluted:
To Captains of the Squadron! Whereas the Pernicious Custom of the Seamen drinking their Allowance of Rum in Drams, and often at once, is attended by many fatal Effects to their Morals as well as their Health, the daily allowance of half a pint a man is to be mixed with a quart of water, to be mixed in one Scuttled Butt kept for that purpose, and to be done upon Deck, and in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Watch, who is to see that the men are not defrauded of their allowance of Rum.
One may presume the tars were not best pleased by this, not least considering the foul stuff called water that was usually available on board ship (the Admiral said later in his order that men might, if they had the money, buy sugar or limes to make the water more palatable to them). The men, as was their custom, had already given Vernon the nickname of Old Grog, because on deck in rough weather he wore a cloak made of a coarse fabric called grogram, a mixture of silk with mohair or wool, often stiffened with gum. ("Grogram"is from French "gros grain", coarse grain.) So it was a short step to naming the diluted drink "grog".
This might be dismissed as no more than another folk tale about the origin of words, especially as no contemporary record of "grog" has been found. However, it was widely believed in the Royal Navy to be the origin, to judge from the earliest example we have. It is from a poem written by Dr Thomas Trotter, the surgeon of HMS Berwick. He wrote these lines on board ship on 4 August 1781:
A mighty bowl on deck he drew,
And filled it to the brink;
Such drank the Burford's gallant crew,
And such the gods shall drink.
The sacred robe which Vernon wore
Was drenched within the same;
And hence his virtues guard our shore,
And Grog derives its name.
The term was broadened by landlubbers who were ill-conversant with naval customs to mean any strong drink, though in Australia and New Zealand it can also mean beer. "Groggy", a word first used in the West Indies, came from "grog" to mean a person overcome by liquor; later its meaning expanded to include anybody who was unsteady and dazed for any reason.
Perhaps That Wasn't the Last Drop After All . . .
In the next issue of World Wide Words, a question came up about whether the story above was actually true, so in case any of you ardent readers are thinking that Mr. Quinion might be mistaken, here's what went down on March 22:
A note on "Grog"
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Last week's piece on "grog", which told the conventional story of its origin, led to two very interesting countervailing suggestions.
Martin Watts told me that the Wikipedia article on the word asserts there's an earlier example, in Daniel Defoe's The Family Instructor of 1718, which has a Barbados slave boy say that "black men" in the West Indies "make the sugar, make the grog, much great work, much weary work all day long." Jonathon Green records in his Cassell's Dictionary of Slang that another earlier example is given in The Roxburghe Ballads, a famous collection of broadsheet songs, mainly from the seventeenth century. He tells me that it appears in volume 7, edited by Joseph Ebsworth and published in 1893, in a ballad whose title is Pensive Maid and whose date is given as 1672-85: "In a public-house then they both sot down / And talk'd of admirals of high renown / And drunk'd as much grog as come to half-a-crown."
On the principle that you only need one white crow to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, either of these would be enough to sink the Admiral Vernon story full fathom five with no prospect of rescue. However, matters, as so often in etymology, aren't as clear-cut as they might seem. The Defoe citation is given in later editions of the book and in quotations from it (I'm still trying to get access to a first edition) not as Wikipedia cites it, but as "makee the sugar, makee the ginger; much great work, weary work, all day, all night". Ebsworth, despite his many failings, was a scrupulous editor, and his dating ought to be on the mark (though I can't find Green's date in the volume). But it's a one-off example in a collection bedevilled by fakes and which has later additions (there's one about the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, for example). The reference to admirals, and the general tone of the piece, hints it might have been written after 1740 in knowledge of the Vernon tale.
The only firm date is that it must be older than its reproduction in a book of comic songs of 1818 compiled by Thomas Hudson.
Incidentally, the comic song might conceivably be our source for the expression "before one can say Jack Robinson", meaning very fast, since its last line reads "And he was off before they could say Jack Robinson." The first known use of the expression in the OED is dated 1778. It's more likely, however, that the comic song uses an already known expression, which would be a further pointer to its being of post-1740 date.
Thanks, Michael!
| The Cocktailian |
image courtesy of the good folks at quanya
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First Published in
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Having been reared in British pubs, I was pretty good at dealing with barroom customers when I came to this country in 1973, but cocktails were completely beyond me. We didn't do cocktails in Lancashire. We did beer in Lancashire. . .
Click Here for the full story
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The Gin & Tonic is of course an extremely
simple drink to make, but is that any reason to avoid it? Heck I don't
think so, especially when you are using one of the new premium brands of
tonic water coming onto the market, like "Q Tonic". It was on August 15, 1954, that Ramón "Monchito"
Marrero Pérez first introduced the Piña Colada to the customers of the
Beachcomber Bar at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is
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And Then There Was Dirty Tom McAlear
“Perhaps the lowest of the Sydney-Town dives were the Boar's Head, where the principal attraction was a sexual exhibition in which a woman and a boar participated; the Goat and Compass and the Golden Rule, both owned by one Hell Haggerty, a ticket-of-leave man from Sydney; and the Fierce Grizzly, so called because a live female bear was kept chained beside the door. The Goat and Compass was the particular hang-out of a Sydney-Town character known as Dirty Tom McAlear, who for a few cents would eat or drink any sort of refuse offered to him."
The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by Herbert Asbury, 1933.
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