Mosedale Mike - Bees Knees and Barmy Armies: Origins of the Words and Phrases We Use Every Day

While most of us are familiar with the charms of alcohol, there was a time when only the fairer sex would have been well acquainted with it. The word comes from the Arabic al kohl, meaning a fine black powder used for eye make-up. Now time for the science: this powder was formed by sublimation (transforming a solid to a vapour) and then recooling back to a solid. The word entered the English language in the sixteenth century, with the definite article assumed to be part of the word, giving alcohol, which described any extremely fine powder. Subsequently it came to mean any fluid obtained through distillation. One such essence, alcohol of wine, and the spirit of any fermented liquor, became the best known of these and is the alcohol we know, love (and sometimes hate!) today.

To have, or go on, a blowout is to leave behind restraint and consume vast quantities of food, especially rich food of the kind you wouldnt eat every day. Certainly most of us experience the results of a blowout over the festive period. The phrase originally described a huge indulgent feast, quite crudely illustrating the swelling of the belly. In more recent times the meaning has extended to describe throwing caution to the wind and overindulging in other things, such as alcohol.

Now thats a different kettle of fish, we sometimes say when drawing a distinction between one matter and another. But we may be unaware that the phrase kettle of fish has been around for centuries, and that when preceded by adjectives such as fine, nice or pretty, the phrase was once used ironically to mean an awful mess. It seems that different kettle grew out of fine kettle. But why kettles, and why fish?

In the eighteenth century, long before the days of Russell and Hobbs, a kettle was any vessel used for boiling things up in, so it wasnt considered odd to fill a kettle with fish, especially if you lived near the River Tweed, close to the border between England and Scotland. Aristocrats used to hold picnics there, a practice commented upon by Thomas Newte in his Tour of England and Scotland in 1785: It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fte champtre, which they call giving a kettle of fish. Tents or marquees are pitched near the flowery banks of the river a fire is kindled, and live salmon thrown into boiling kettles. So it seems there were many fine kettles of fish to be had back then, and we can only assume that, now and again, it all went wrong perhaps all those salmon would spill out of the kettle, maybe the kettle would boil over, or the fish tasted ghastly. In any case, such messy errors could well have led to the birth of the sardonic expression Thats a fine kettle of fish.

This is all very well, but it remains a bit of a mystery how our modern usage of the phrase developed. My guess is that to say a different kettle of fish became a way of distinguishing between a messy thing and something less chaotic after all, a ruined kettle of fish would have contrasted strongly with a perfect one.

The grocer that we know today was originally a wholesaler, a grossier, selling the likes of tea, coffee, spices and dried fruits in bulk, or by the gross (meaning 144, from the French gros, big), to the vendor. The merchant who actually sold these goods to customers was known as a spicer. There is some confusion about when exactly the word grocer took on its present meaning, but it may have been as early as the fourteenth century.

A strong, illicitly distilled and distributed liquor, hooch is often also described as bootleg (because bottles were hidden in boot legs) or moonshine (because it was usually made at night). When the USA purchased Alaska in 1867 it made the sale of alcohol in the territory illegal. The local Tlingit Indians, living in a village called Hoochinoo, began making their own alcoholic drink. When the Alaskan gold rush started during the 1890s, the name was shortened to hooch, and it came to mean any poor-quality illegal alcoholic beverage. Incidentally, hooch is the only Tlingit Indian word to make it into the English language.