Since you'll all be drunk today

I figured it was time to investigate the word "hooch". And there's nowhere better to look than "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts" by John Ciardi. The words you see below are all his.

Hooch. 1. Rotgut. 2. Any hard liquor. [Hoochino, the American rendering of the name of a Tlingit tribe of Eskimos of southern Alaska, the name in its unpronounceable original meaning "the people of the strait of the grizzly bear."]

HISTORIC. No Amerinds had developed fermented or distilled drinks before the coming of the white man, though many then developed a disastrous taste for firewater. Under the Russian occupation, the Alaskan Indians seem to have acquired no knowledge of alcohol. With the arrival of the Americans in the mid nineteenth century, however, the Alaskan Indians became riotous drunkards.

The Americans ate sourdough bread. A bucket of sourdough starter, if left for a few days, exudes a slightly fermented liquid, a sort of noxious flat beer for which the Tlingits developed a taste; but "hooch" was yet to come.

Regulations forbade hard liquor on the military post, and a still would be too fragrant to conceal. An American army sergeant, therefore, scrounged the parts for a still, rigged up a cooker and coils in the Hoochino village, and showed the natives how to distill.

With access to sugar and molasses from the American trading post, and with a natural talent for throwing into the mash anything else they could find, the Hoochinos soon became manufacturers of a perilous rotgut which they not only drank in binges that involved the whole village and all nearby white men, but took to distributing through most of southern Alaska. In a memoir of Alaskan travels in 1880, John Muir tells of meeting a party of Chilcat Indians on a 200-mile trek to a Hoochino village to demand blood money for a Chilcat woman who had diet of drinking their rotgut.

A few words from Ciardi

The following is from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts". 

Gossip. Originally, either of the two godparents who served as baptismal sponsors. In late Old English godsibb, godsibbe (sibling). Middle English forms: godsip, gossyp. The sense shift from god-parent to tittle-tattler took place late in the sixteenth century. Historic: A man and a woman sponsored an infant at its baptism, taking a vow to oversee its religious development. So sacred was this vow that godsibbes were forbidden to marry, they being already joined in a sacramental obligation. That vow, when conscientiously fulfilled, would require regular intimate discussions between the godparents, whence the sense shift to "people often seen with their heads together in intimate conversation about someone else."

Jerkwater town. The most primitive of small towns. Originally, a town on the railroad line, but too backward to have even a water tower. Early steam engines had an insatiable appetite for water. When they ran out at a town without a water tower, the train crew had to "jerk" water in buckets from the local wells and haul it laboriously to the locomotive. Needless to say, jerking water was not their most popular sport, whence the contempt with which they labeled the place a jerkwater town.

Mutual admiration society. A company of friends in which every member praises every other. . . [F]rom Society of Mutual Admiration, coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, two chapters of which were written for the New England Magazine in 1731-1832; the rest for the Atlantic Monthly starting in 1857. After the 25-year interim, Holmes began again with the calmly underplayed, "I was just going to say when I was interrupted . . ."]

Pipsqueak. An insignificant runt. Echoic. In World War I, a name given to a small German shell, because it exploded with a pip after giving off a squeak in flight -- or so rendered by British and American troops by comparison with the shrill whistle and boom of heavy artillery. Then, by extension, any insignificant thing; and then the original reference fading from memory.

Rascal. A scamp. Certainly something less than a villain. No one, for example, has ever thought to call Hitler a rascal. And in fact, the term is often used affectionately for one who has misbehaved in an endearing way. But at root: "one of the cruddy rabble," and specifically "one with a filthy skin disease" (a crud-scratcher), possibly with reference to the lesions of advanced syphilis, assumed by aristocrats to be the price the rabble paid for its depraved life-style (but ask Henry VII, who died of the royal form of the same crud). [red, rad, to scrape, scratch, gnaw . . . Latin, radere, with same senses; Provencal: rasca, rash, crud; and finally to Middle English: rascaille, the cruddy rabble.]

It's here!

My new copy of John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: a Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts" finally arrived -- and it's even better than I remembered.

If you love words, you will cherish this book. Ciardi is a knowledgeable, creative and funny man, which makes his explanations a joy to read. The preface alone is worth the price of the book. (And in that preface he mentions my favorite word origin story: where the word nasty comes from.)

Ciardi isn't a one-trick pony, either. Another of his books is "How Does a Poem Mean?" -- an introduction to poetic structure and meaning. And he wrote a book with Isaac Asimov called "Limericks: Too Gross". The man gets around.

You'll get a chance to read some of Ciardi's explanations of word and phrase origins right here tomorrow. (And get ready for a great language of baseball post over the weekend!)