- There are no shortage of wacky names
for alcoholic beverages, from fuzzy navels,
to sex on the beaches, or sexes on the beach,
to the NSFW AMF.
I'm not sure if any of these actually taste good
or if they're just fun to yell in a crowded bar.
The origins of some are obvious,
while others are more contentious.
Two bars in Juarez, Mexico and one tequila distributor
in California are among those claiming to be the mastermind
behind the world-famous Margarita, which was either named
after a woman or a flower, depending on who you believe.
Boy, if we can't even agree
on the etymology of an 80 year old word,
how are we going to find ones that are 5,000 years old?
Fortunately, or unfortunately,
humans have been enjoying alcoholic beverages
since the dawn of civilization,
so there's plenty of linguistic evidence
in many languages to point us to the truth.
As the Romans said, in vino veritas.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky and this is "Other Words".
(quirky upbeat music)
♪ Other words ♪
Speaking of vino, in 2017, a group of archeologists
discovered the earliest known winery in the world.
In an ancient village east of the Black Sea,
in what is now Georgia, stone age people were growing grapes
and fermenting the juice 8,000 years ago.
This is not far geographically or chronologically
from the speakers of Proto-Indo-European,
a hypothetical language that linguists believe
to be the ancestor of hundreds of modern day languages,
from English, to Spanish, to German, Greek,
Russian, Hindi, Persian, Norwegian,
the list goes on and on.
Though this discovery is archeological evidence
that the Proto-Indo-Europeans drank wine,
historical linguists already knew this to be the case.
How?
Because many of these languages still have similar words
for the beverage, vino, wijn, Wein, oinos, gini.
Words that share a common ancestor like this
are known as cognates.
Linguists have even been able
to reverse engineer these cognates
to reconstruct what the ancestor word
might have sounded like: uoin.
Though most people think of wine
as the oldest alcoholic beverage,
there's actually something older.
Slightly before the Black Sea Winery was in production,
Neolithic peoples in the Yellow River Valley
were making an alcoholic drink
out of fermented rice, fruit, and honey.
Honey may be the first ingredient
that humans ever fermented into alcohol,
because unlike grapes, rice, or wheat,
you don't need agriculture to harvest it,
as depicted by some ancient cave paintings.
The resulting beverage today called mead
has a long list of cognates that show we've been stealing
from the bees for a very long time.
The Proto-Indo-European ancestor of all these cognates,
medu, may have been adapted from the Proto-Semitic matak.
From there, other non Indo-European speakers
likely borrowed the term as well.
Hence, the Finnish mesi, Proto-Chinese mit,
and Japanese mitsu.
That's a pretty prolific word
considering you don't see mead around much these days,
unless you're one of those people who brings it to parties.
Moving to the beer aisle,
a craft microbrew aficionado might be able
to tell you the exact differences between ales and lagers,
but the origins of those words
are more like hefeweizen than a pilsner,
in that it's cloudy and opaque.
Bad beer joke.
Ale is probably a Scandinavian term
for a malt-based beverage.
The word alu appears on ancient runic inscriptions
across Scandinavia, often alongside references
to leeks, suggesting that ale was thought
to have medicinal properties.
Some think the word is related to the Latin alum,
meaning bitter, which would make it a cognate with aluminum,
or maybe it's connected to the Germanic verb alan,
which meant to grow or swell,
perhaps a reference to the fermentation process.
This would make it cognates with old.
Beer comes from the Old English beor,
which some have suggested is related to the word barley.
This seems unlikely though,
since beor was originally a sweet, fruit-based drink.
It wasn't until later that it became a synonym for ale.
The more accepted source is a borrowing
of the Latin bibere, which meant to drink,
also where we get beverage and imbibe.
Lager is short for the German lagerbier,
which meant a beer that was laid down
or stored for a long time.
It comes from the P-I-E root legh,
which also gives us the word law
because you can lay down the law.
Today, the term laid down is still used
to describe the long storage of alcoholic drinks.
- I've got a few bottles of the old Winyard left.
It was laid down by my father.
- I know you're not supposed to follow beer with liquor,
but let's move on to the hard stuff.
The earliest archeological evidence suggests
that Muslim chemists were distilling wine
into a concentrated liquor in the eighth or ninth century.
Alcohol actually has an Arabic origin, al-kohl,
a purified gray powder used for cosmetic purposes.
The practice spread to Europe
where the distillation process was seen
as extracting the very spirit of wine,
which was believed to have life-giving properties.
Hence, the Latin name, aqua vitae, water of life.
This term migrated to several other languages
like eau de vie in French, akvavit in Scandinavian,
okowita in Polish, and uisce beatha in Gaelic,
which was eventually shortened to whiskey.
Some linguists believe the term
also influenced the Russian vodka,
which literally means little water.
As the distillation process spread across the world,
the resulting liquors were typically named
either after their main ingredient, as in gin and rye,
or their place of origin, like bourbon and scotch.
The agave plant of Mexico is used
to make three different kinds of alcoholic drinks;
tequila, which is named after the town of origin,
mezcal, which is named after the plant
from the Nahuatl mexcalli, and pulque,
a sour, milky beverage made from agave sap.
Pulque is the oldest of the three,
originally called octli by the Meso-Americans
who invented it thousands of years ago.
The Spanish name was probably a corruption
of a Nahuatl term, poliuhqui octli,
which means spoiled octli.
Once you start mixing liquors with other beverages,
the result is widely known as a cocktail,
although no one is certain why.
One theory refers to a 19th century New Orleans socialite
who served mixed drinks in egg cups,
known in French as coquetiers.
Another suggests it's named after a horse's tail
that has been cut short, as was the fashion
with horses of mixed pedigree.
Now that everyone has the drink they ordered,
it's time to raise our glasses for a toast.
Wait, why is it called a toast?
It can't really have anything to do
with twice cooked bread, can it?
Actually, yes.
There was an archaic tradition of adding a small piece
of charred bread into your wine
to add flavor and soup acidity.
Since this was typically done on festive occasions,
you can imagine it to be the perfect moment
to say something special
before everyone takes their first sip.
So whatever you're poison, or no poison at all,
salud, prost, zdarovya, serefe, kanpai and cheers.
Moving to the beer aisle, a craft micro boot,
micro brew, a craft micro (laughs).
A craft mico, a craft mico. (sighs)
Micro.
Microwave, microbrew. (slow soft music)