The Wordsplainer: Cocktail – a word against sobriety

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The Wordsplainer explains Anglicisms
Cocktail – a word against sobriety

In a time when new things are often touched on with the English language, it tastes good Anglicismcocktail pleasantly timeless. In fact, it is a classic. The Oxford English Dictionary leads the first entry for cocktail as an alcoholic drink from 1803 – at that time still as medical advice for headaches. It was published by an American magazine for farmers called “The Farmer’s Cabinet“.

The first association, the word, also fits a farm cocktail awakens: a proud rooster, which in English cock and in French it means “le coq”, while we have to make do with “chick”, which has the same word origin. The tail or tail of the male animal – the cock’s tail – is an ancient eye-catcher with its colorful feathers. Loud OED It has symbolized virility and courtship since ancient times. At some point this got to the point where… cock for the four-letter word and became synonymous with the penis. On the meaning of the word cocktail But that can’t help – after all, a “cocktail” would be nothing more than an impotent tautology.

The cocktail as a “magic potion for political elections”

If we now ask ourselves what we are… cocktail-glass, there’s no reason to fear sperm or a chicken egg – although egg whites aren’t the worst thing, at least in a Peruvian “pisco sour.” In 1806 the magazine “The Balance and Columbian Repository“: The cocktail is an “invigorating, alcoholic drink” – a stimulating liquor – from “all spirits” – spirits of any kind – plus sugar, water and bitters. A combination that in bar language is also “Sling” is called. Furthermore, the cocktail a “magic potion for political elections” – an excellent electioneering position. Since it made the heart wild and the head dizzy, the cynical and suggestive conclusion was: “A person having swallowed a glass of cocktail, is ready to swallow anything else.”

At least it was clear that the cocktail never consists of a single, pure spirit, but is always a blend. In a so-called Manhattan For example, grain or wine brandy mixes with wormwood and bitters, in the so-called Martini Juniper or potato brandy with a little wormwood and bitters. The editorial team of OED therefore considers it likely that cocktail comes from an expression that came into use in the 18th century for horse breeding and is no longer in use. To identify animals that were not purebred, a colorful, protruding rooster tail was attached to them. “The horse is cocktailed“, they said, and soon the phrase took on a life of its own to describe all sorts of mixed breeds on four legs. The cocktail meanwhile became what it is today.

The 20th century made that cocktail ultimately becoming an epitome of all mixtures, not just animals and drinks. Sometimes pure and fine, sometimes unrefined and spoiled. To Cocktails made from fruits and seafood – the latter a specialty in post-war Germany – joined in Cocktails from medications and drugs. The Russo-Finnish Winter War, which took place for the first time in 1939, demonstrated how destructive it can be Molotov cocktails exploded: makeshift grenades in glass bottles.

Even alcohol is no longer mandatory

The more the cocktail spilled from the glasses of the bars into sober life and became the hallmark of the eclectic Lifestyle became, the more synonyms emerged for the mess – the “mishmash”, which is called the same thing in English: mishmash. According to the motto “Anything goes“, which the philosopher Paul Feyerabend used as a scientific slogan in the 1970s, is the cocktail just one among many Mashups, mergers or Crossovers. They refine, dilute and distort the most diverse forms of life. Even alcohol is no longer mandatory, like that Mocktail proves – the falsification of the falsification that only appears as one cocktail.

That the elegant and timelessly fleeting character is more classic Cocktails Despite everything, the most passionate agitators and agitators see it as the result of its true, mysterious origins, along with its parties and clothes. In her imagination, she resembles the most beautiful intoxication. The idol of this movement was the British Bartenders Harry Craddock, who moved to the USA in 1897 to study the guild. Just in time for the start of the prohibition he returned to London in 1920 to “American Bar” in the Savoy Hotel – and fill it with the magic of his mixtures.

When Craddock published the still authoritative drinks book in 1930,The Savoy Cocktail Book“, he didn’t miss the opportunity to reveal his own version of the story: Because of Roostertail! That’s what he did cocktail absolutely nothing to do. Rather, it is the anglicized form of the girl’s name “Coctel” – more precisely, an interrogator of US soldiers who were dazzled by the beauty and impressed by the cleverness of a young Mexican woman at the beginning of the 19th century. She served a drink for two warring parties in a golden cup – and drank it herself without further ado so as not to offend anyone. They were commanded by a king of the Mexicans who wanted to make peace and who cockily and yet quite appropriately named Craddock after the Mexican tailed amphibian: Axolotl. In Craddock’s fairy tale, the fact that he didn’t exist any more than he knew the girl didn’t stop him from passing off Coctel as his daughter. The American general is said to have declared that he would honor her name forever.
“Coctel, of course, became ‘Cocktail,’ and there you are,” Craddock wrote. Please! It’s not hard to imagine him handing out the perfect mix in the middle of the night. Of course in a golden cup. Everything else doesn’t matter.