The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

A Punch of Drinks

The etymology of alcohol is as unsteady as one would have suspected. For starters the word alcohol is Arabic. This may seem odd, given that Islam is a teetotal religion, but when the Arabs used the word alcohol they didn’t mean the same stuff that we do. Alcohol comes from al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.

As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there’s a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass’s spleen), but it wasn’t until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the bright idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember, and then in 1753 everybody got so drunk that wine-alcohol was shortened to alcohol.

Spirits arrived in the drinks cabinet by almost exactly the same root, but this time from alchemy. In alchemy (there’s the Arabic the again) every chemical was thought to contain vital spirits, little fairies who lived in the substance and made it do funny things. On this basis gunpowder contained fiery spirits, acid contained biting spirits, and things like whisky and vodka contained the best spirits of all, the ones that got you plastered. It’s odd that whisky and vodka get you drunk at all, as, according to their names, they are both water.

Vodka comes from the Russian voda, which means water, and indeed both words come from the same Proto-Indo-European root: wodor.

The word whisky is surprisingly recent. It’s not recorded before 1715, when it leapt into the lexicon with the sterling sentence: ‘Whiskie shall put our brains in a rage.’ Philologists, though, are reasonably agreed that it comes from the Gaelic uisge beatha meaning water of life.

Why the water of life? The Scots hadn’t made the name up, they merely took it from alchemical Latin. Alchemists, who were trying to turn base metal into gold, could find consolation for their failure in the fact that it’s pretty damned easy to distil alcohol, which they called ardent spirits or aqua vitae (water of life).

It wasn’t only drunken Scotsmen who took aqua vitae into their own language. The Scandinavians called their home-brew aquavit, without even bothering to translate, and the French called their brandy eau de vie.

However, the water of life is also a delightful euphemism for urine. This should be drunk in moderation. Morarji Desai, who was Prime Minister of India, used to start every day by drinking the liquor brewed in his own internal distillery, which he always referred to as ‘the water of life’. Desai claimed that Gandhi had taught him the trick, although the Gandhi Institute denies this vehemently and says that Desai’s story is balderdash.

Balderdash used to be a kind of drink as well. Not a very good kind of drink, mind you: it was wine mixed with beer or water or anything else that meant that you could sell it cheap. Balderdash was strange stuff, but not nearly so rum as rum.

Rum was once a thieves’ word meaning good; but like most thieves’ slang the adjective rum got a bad reputation and started to mean queer or a little bit fishy. It’s hard to say which of these uses caused the Caribbean spirit previously known as kill-devil to be nicknamed rumbullion. Or perhaps it was just a variant of rum booze, in reference to rum’s strong and sugary nature. It might even be something to do with the Devon dialect word rumbullion meaning uproar, or it could be the dnuora yaw rehto. Or maybe it was a rum bouillon or strange brew. Either way, rum is first recorded in 1654 and by 1683 people were already making rum punch.

Vodka, whisky, aquavit, balderdash and rum are just enough to make the sort of punch that will knock you out. Only just, mind you, because punch comes from the Hindi word for five: panch. That’s because, technically, a punch should contain five different ingredients: spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar and spice. That’s also the reason that the area of India that contains five rivers is called the Punjab.

Panch derives from the Sanskrit for five, pancas, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European penkwe, which went into Greek as pent and gave us a pentagon.

But if you want to get properly sloshed you need the queen of drinks: champagne.