We were talking the other day and I’d remarked that something Claire had made was really good. She said that all recipes that have booze in them are good. “Booze” is a funny word — how’d we come to refer to alcoholic beverages as booze?
A number of sources I discovered credited the origin of the term to E.C. Booz, who was a distiller in the United States in the 19th century. I’m pretty sure those sources are wrong because the term was used long before Mr. Booz became a distiller. The first references of the word booze, meaning “alcoholic drink,” seems to have appeared in the English language around the 14th century. At that time, the word was “bouse.” The current spelling didn’t appear until about the 17th century — still long before E.C. Booz and his distillery.
Booze isn’t the only term used to describe some kind of alcoholic beverage — I’ve heard the various beverages referred to as hooch, moonshine, vino, draft, suds, liquid courage, redneck wine and of course native Americans used the term fire water.
Whatever you call it, it’s been around (and popular) for a long time…. I think Benjamin Franklin summed up our relationship with drinking when he said, “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
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