cocktail

Apparently neither cocktails nor cocks have much to do with roosters.

First, cocktail is a bit of a mystery. That may seem surprising because roosters are cocks and roosters have tails, but that combination of facts doesn’t exactly make a straight line to beverages. Etymonline credits H.L. Mencken with seven different origins for the term, which has been in use since 1806, but the only one cited as being worth consideration is the French coquetier, “egg-cup,” which would have been rendered in English in the fifteenth century as cocktay. According to the entry: “In New Orleans, c. 1795, Antoine Amédée Peychaud, an apothecary (and inventor of Peychaud bitters) held Masonic social gatherings at his pharmacy, where he mixed brandy toddies with his own bitters and served them in an egg-cup. On this theory, the drink took the name of the cup.” There is actually a precedence for this, where the consumed thing takes its name from the dish it’s either prepared in or served in: casserole originally meant “stew pan,” for example, and barbecue today refers to both the meat and the device we cook it on.

Etymonline also gives an alternate possibility, however, noting how the Diner’s Dictionary points to cocktail previously meaning “horse with a docked tail,” which in turn derives from the fact that a horse’s shortened tail cut would stand up like a cock’s comb. Because this would be done to non-pedigreed, non-thoroughbred horses, it allegedly took on the sense of “adulteration, mixture” that carried over to mixed drinks.

There is a third one that Etymonline either doesn’t endorse or didn’t know about, and I’m including it here just because it’s wild. The food website Chowhound, citing a now vanished liquor.com article titled “The Origin of Cocktail Is Not What You Think,” says that because perky tails were a sign of a horse’s health, a less-than-strapping horse would sometimes be induced to perk up its tail so as to seem more appealing to prospective buyers… and this was done specifically by putting either ginger or pepper up its butt. 

I know.

This seems like something that is not true. And the fact that this legend’s source seems to have been pulled from the internet certainly doesn’t make it seem more likely to be true. But as the Chowhound article goes on to explain, the fact that ginger and pepper were also ingredients used to add a kick to alcoholic drinks, the term went from horse’s butts to drinking glasses in bars across the United States. 

But what about cock? It would seem sensible that the version of the word we use to mean “penis” would have something to do with roosters, since roosters tend to act in an especially virile fashion. But no, as I learned today listening to the linguistics podcast Lexicon Valley, the term doesn’t have anything to do with male chickens. Etymonline supports this, giving this definition of cock its own entry separate from the bird one. It says English has used cock to mean “penis” going back to as early as the fourteenth century, but it also points out the term pilicock, also meaning “penis,” that goes back to the twelfth century and that was also sometimes a surname. On Lexicon Valley, John McWhorter connects cock and pilicock more directly and also points out that pilicock could also mean “a guy” — and Merriam-Webster basically agrees, defining pilicock as either “penis” or “a fine lad.” And that connection is also interesting, because the more common slang term we have for penis today, at least in the U.S., is dick, which can also mean “a guy,” at least in the sense of “Tom, Dick and Harry.”

In closing and in summary, I will point out that Etymonline also flatly states “the cock actually has no penis,” which out of context is confusing but is a valid point nonetheless.