One of the customers was
speculating the other day about the origin of the word cocktail. It’s a
subject I have not previously dealt with because cocktail is one of those words whose etymology
ought to be very straightforward, but, in fact, is cloaked in such an enigmatic
miasma of wispy supposition that tracking it down becomes frustrating.
The first recorded use
of the word (actually two words) to mean a beverage was in the May 6, 1806
edition of The Balance and Columbian
Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, NY. A reader was so puzzled by this
usage, that he asked for an explanation, and the editor (whose reply betrays
his Federalist political preference) obliged the following week: “As I make it
a point, never to publish anything but which I can explain, I shall not
hesitate to gratify the curiosity of my inquisitive correspondent: Cock tail,
then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and
bitters; it is vulgarly called a bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent
electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the
same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a
democratic candidate: because, a person having swallowed a glass of it, is
ready to swallow any thing else.”
Originally, most pundits
agree, the word was an adjective describing a “creature with a tail resembling
that of a cock, or rooster,” specifically a horse with a “docked” tail—one from
which the hair has been trimmed down to the fleshy part of the tail. This was a customary treatment for
hunting and coach horses. A non-thoroughbred racehorse, descended from such
cock-tailed horses, became known disparagingly as a cocktail. Later, a
person trying to pass as a gentleman, but lacking proper breeding, was called a
cocktail. Such an adulteration of
pedigree, some linguists suggest, was analogous to the adulteration of liquors
in the drink that took on the name cocktail
sometime around the turn of the nineteenth-century.
This is a pretty circuitous
chain of reasoning, and the acerbic H. L. Mencken, who was known to lift a few
cocktails in his prime, was not convinced by such far-fetched explanations. In The American Language Mencken wrote,
“The etymology of the cocktail has
long engaged the learned, but without persuasive result.”
He went on to cite
William Henry Nugent in an article about cock fighting that surmised that cocktail derived from a mixture of stale
bread, beer, wine, and spirits, as well as herbs and seeds, that was prepared
by nineteenth-century Irish and English gamecock trainers to condition the
birds for fighting. The trainers
began to sample this concoction (before adding the stale bread) and found it to
their liking. They called it cock-bread
ale, or cock ale, and in the spelling
of the time, it became cock ail, and
somehow a t was added.
Another theory suggested
by Mencken came from a 1926 article by Marcel Boulenger arguing that cocktail was derived from coquetel, the name of a drink known for
centuries in the vicinity of Bordeaux. No explanation is given for the
etymology of coquetel.
Yet another version of
the word’s origin traces it back to coquetier,
which is French for “egg-cup.” Supposedly around 1795 Antoine Peychaud, a New
Orleans apothecary (who invented Peychaud bitters), mixed toddies with his
bitters and brandy and served them to fellow Masons in an egg cup—and the drink
took on the name coquetier, or cocktay and later cocktail in English.
Some other ideas that
have been put forth are:
• Bartenders would drain the dregs of
all the barrels and mix them together to serve at a reduced price. A spigot was called a “cock” and the
dregs were “tailings,” so this drink was known as “cock-tailings” or later
simply cocktail.
• These leftovers were served from a ceramic vessel shaped like a
rooster, with a tap in the tail.
• Doctors treated throat problems with a pleasant-tasting medicine
applied to the tip of a feather from a cock's tail.
• The word refers to the fact that a potent drink will "cock your
tail," i.e., get your spirits up.
• The word derives from a sixteenth-century drink known as “cock-ale,”
whose ingredients included a ground-up boiled rooster.
• There was an Aztec princess named Xochitl (anglicized as Coctel) who
was fond of fermented beverages to which she gave her name.
Such confusion is enough
to drive you to drink straight gin, as the Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been known
to do. The incoherence caused by such overindulgence persists in his surviving
works, like the following:
A florist walked
into a bar,
And said, “I’ll have two Buds.”
A laundress right behind him asked,
“Could I just have some suds?”
“On second thought,” the laundress said,
“Make that a cup of Cheer.”
And then an undertaker croaked,
“I think I’ll have a
bier.”
An optician walked into the bar
And said, “I’d like two glasses.”
A fisherman declared, “I want
Some ale—make that two Basses.”
A milkman walked into the bar,
And said, “I’ll take a quart.”
A sailor right behind him piped,
“Just let me drown in port.”
A cotton-farmer in the bar
Remarked, “I need a gin.”
A census-taker then appeared
And asked for Mickey Finn.
A contortionist squeezed in
And called out, “Bottom’s up!”
Omar Khayyam came in then
And wrote, “Come fill the cup.”
A gunman walked into the bar
And said, “I’ll take a shot.”
A realtor scanned the drink list and
Declared, “Give me the lot.”
