10 Years After

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

I first encountered Kingsley Amis a few years back when I picked up his "The King's English: a guide to modern English." It was witty and fabulous. Then, last year sometime, I picked up his "On Drink" from The Book Thing in Baltimore. Fantastic.

I thought three things from "On Drink" worth blogging:

Publisher's Note
Linguists tell us that the the differences between American English and English English are small and mostly concentrated around the everyday things of life. Drink being, indubitably, onbe fo the most everyday things of life and Kingsley Amis being unredeemably, gloriously English, the reader of On Drink will perhaps find here and there an occasional unfamiliar usage or reference. We have pondered this problem, polled our numbers, and have decided against tampering with Mr. Amis's Anglicisms, for, we think, the very good reason that he always says things better than we could say them, even when he says them in a different way.
To be sure, the problem is not always severe. When the author speaks, as Englishmen will, of pubs, motor cars, cupboards and hogsheads, we more or less understand. As for pence and pounds, it's no good converting them to dollars anyhow; they change too often these days. Worthington and Double Diamond (two beers, we think) are a bit more difficult, and while The Wine Development Board might speak for itself, we were baffled by G.L.C.(a government term?) and V.A.T. (not the Scotch whisky, we believe). Furthermore, if you are as puzzled as we are by the identity of among others, Donald Watt, George Gale, T. G. Rosenthall and, notably, Reginald Bosanquet, inventor of his own "Golden Elixir" - may it prolong his own life and that of all who imbibe it - then we can only recommend the resources of your local library, or, more suitable to the subject, the resources of your local bar.
We could go on, to literary references for instance, but we've been interrupted. What's you say, barman?"Time please"? Ah well, bottoms up.

Inexplicable I found myself with a curiosity for absinthe when I first encountered reading about it. I think it was an article in Wired magazine. Several years after that I re-encountered it reading something by Peter Mayle. A friend of mine said she ordered a bottle of actual absinthe online. I must look into this. Here's Amis' comment on the drink and a bit of etymology, to boot.

[In a list of store bought drinks to keep on hand]
6. A pseudo-absinthe such as Pernod or Ricard. True absinthe (the name is from a Greek word meaning 'undrinkable') has been illegal in most places for a long time. It is, or was, flavoured with the herb wormwood, which, as the French authorities noticed after years of using absinthe in their army to combat fever, 'acts powerfully on the nerve-centers, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy'(Encyclopedia Britannica). The perfectly wholesome successors to absinthe are flavoured with ANSI, or aniseed. The result always reminds me, not unpleasantly, of those paregoric cough-sweets children ate before the war, and I see that paregoric does contain aniseed, but throws in opium, camphor and benzoic acid as well, so I am probably just being nostalgic. Anyway, when recipes call for absinthe, as they can still do if their compilers and revisers have been too ignorant or lazy to make the change, use Pernod or Ricard instead.
Incidentally, what happened about vermouth, which is also flavoured with wormwood? - 'vermouth' being a French or German attempt to say 'wormwood'. Could the idiocy, or bloody foolishness, which comes to afflict the multi-martini-man be the result of wormwood in the vermouth? No. Is is the alcohol, you see. (And I suspect it was the alcohol in the absinthe, too, that caused the trouble all along, when the stuff was taken to excess.)
(page 54-5)

I'm not sure about the etymology of absinthe. AHD relates [Middle English, wormwood, from Old French, from Latin absinthium, from Greek apsinthion.]It is more clear on vermouth, [French vermout, from German Wermut, from Middle High German wermuot, wormwood, from Old High German wermuota.] Looking up wormwood the AHD gives [Middle English wormwode, alteration (influenced by worm, worm, and wode, wood, perhaps from the use of its leaves as a vermifuge), of wermod from Old English wermõd, from Germanic *wermõdaz.](please note: instead of a tilde over the 'o' it should just be a solid bar). Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary ties back to the Greek meaning of the word:

Heb. la'anah, the Artemisia absinthium of botanists. It is noted for its intense
bitterness (Deut. 29:18; Prov. 5:4; Jer. 9:15; Amos 5:7). It is a type of
bitterness, affliction, remorse, punitive suffering. In Amos 6:12 this Hebrew
word is rendered "hemlock" (R.V., "wormwood"). In the symbolical language of
the Apocalypse (Rev. 8:10, 11) a star is represented as falling on the waters
of the earth, causing the third part of the water to turn wormwood. The name by
which the Greeks designated it, absinthion, means "undrinkable." The absinthe of
France is distilled from a species of this plant. The "southernwood" or "old
man," cultivated in cottage gardens on account of its fragrance, is another
species of it.

Why Scotch Whisky and not whiskey you might ask. A small matter of lycography he takes up later: "for the factually minded: only Scotch may legally be spelt without the 'e'. (footnote page 39).