 So, where does the word cocktail come from? Could it even come from French? Welcome to the endless knot cocktail bar. Today we'll continue exploring the word cocktail and its connections to horses, egg cups, and the republican elephant. Last time we looked at the origin of the cocktail, and went over a bunch of sometimes outlandish etymologies for the word cocktail. Hashtag princess, I'm looking at you. Today we'll look at some more plausible options, though it's impossible to be sure, and then move on to consider the cocktail as a social institution. In his 1965 book The Booze Reader, A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, George Bishop claims that the word came from a 19th century slang for, quote, A woman of easy virtue who is desirable but impure, and applied to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British gin with foreign matter, including ice. While the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't record this usage, it does list the sense any horse of racing stamp and qualities but decidedly not thoroughbred from a known strain in his parentage, and thus by extension to people referring to a person assuming the position of a gentleman but deficient in thoroughly gentlemanly breeding. So there is perhaps a plausible idea of the cocktail referring to something mixed or adulterated, maybe. Another suggestion is that the word cocktail comes from the French cockatel, a mixed drink from Gironde, which contains the Bordeaux wine region in France. But I haven't been able to find any good evidence that such a drink exists, except in books giving etymologies for cocktail. The most linguistically well supported explanation for the word, even though it might seem to be one of the most unlikely on the face of it, comes from the well documented use of the term cocktail to refer to non thoroughbred horses whose tails have been docked and this remaining stump cocked up, perhaps resembling a rooster's tail. How this word then came to be transferred to the drink is uncertain, but perhaps the bracing effect made one perk up like the horse's tail, or perhaps it was a reference to the practice of sticking ginger somewhere rather close to that cocked tail to get the horse to look more lively when trying to sell it. That idea is supported by the earliest attested use of the word cocktail in Pitt's bar tab that I mentioned last time, cocktail vulgally called ginger. This suggests that the drink was known as something that would perk you up. But it also brings us back to the idea of bishops, that there's a suggestion of mixture or adulteration in the term, maybe that sense of cocktail combined with the sense of docked tail to produce the modern meaning. But still, even if the word seems to come from England, does that mean they get to claim the modern cocktail as their invention? Well, no, not necessarily. Because there's one other tail that almost certainly isn't true, but seems to reflect a clear early step on the road to the cocktail as we know it now. A commonly repeated and on the face of it quite plausible story is that the cocktail comes from New Orleans. As the story goes, an apothecary named Antoine M. Edad Peixot, who emigrated to the French Quarter of New Orleans, from what is now Haiti, in 1795, served a kind of brandy toddy which contained a special bidder as he made. What we now call Peixot bidders. He would either measure out or serve the drink with an egg cup, which in French is called a coquettier, and this French word supposedly becomes, in English, cocktail. Unfortunately, the dates don't quite work out since the story seems to come from about the 1830s, well after the first recorded use of the word cocktail. The drink persisted, however, in the form of the Sazarak, which is named after the brand of cognac called Sazarak de Fauget Fils, and contains absent or other anise-flavored liqueur and Peixot bidders. The first actual printed cocktail recipes are in Jerry Thomas' How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon vivant's companion, which gives recipes for many types of mixed drinks, including a number categorized as cocktails, having bidders in them. Thomas was a colorful individual, the first celebrity bartender. He developed a flashy showmanship and techniques for mixing drinks, juggling bottles, using silver and jewel-encrusted barware, and wearing flashy jewelry himself. His signature drink, the blue blazer, which involved pouring flaming whiskey from one cup into another, creating an arc of flame, was the world's first flaming cocktail. He owned and or worked at a number of bars, but his most famous bar on Broadway in New York City is notable for containing funhouse mirrors and displaying characters of famous people, including the work of Thomas Nast. Nast was a notable caricaturist and satirical cartoonist and is most famous for creating the modern visual representations of Santa Claus and the Republican party elephant to American cultural icons. American prohibition further drove the development of the cocktail. In addition to the cultural focus that grew up around the speakeasies, often celebrated in stories in film, the cocktails too changed with greater use of flavorings such as fruit juices, cream, honey, and so forth to hide the awful flavor of the bathtub gin and other bootleg moonshine, which was produced secretly and quickly to fill the illicit demand. The OED lists the first use of the term cocktail hour as the 1928 Ernest Hemingway story in another country from his famous collection, Men Without Women, but the term almost certainly predates this by quite a bit, and the tradition of the pre-dinner cocktail perhaps grew out of the traditional British five o'clock tea time at hotels that slowly began to also serve drinks then, sometimes made in shakers in the shape of a teapot. British novelist Alec Waugh, older brother of the more famous Evelyn Waugh, claimed to have invented the cocktail party in the spring of 1924 when he served rum swizzles to his astonished guests who had thought they had come for tea. The OED's first citation for the term cocktail party is from fellow English novelist D.H. Lawrence's most famous and notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Though Waugh does seem to have been responsible for kicking off the vogue for the cocktail party, the first actual cocktail party may have been held a while before that in the United States by Mrs. Julius S. Walsh of St. Louis, Missouri in May 1917, according to contemporary newspaper report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. So to end off, I'm going to take it back to that popular story of the so-called first cocktail and make a sazarak. And to be really authentic, I'm doing it with an egg cup. Add a few dashes of absinthe or pernode to a chilled old fashion glass to coat the sides and pour out any excess. Stir or shake two ounces of cognac, a few dashes of pecho bitters, and a sugar cube with ice. Strain into the glass and garnish with a twist of lemon peel. If you have comments or questions, I'm at alliterative on Twitter, or leave them in the comments section below. You can also read more of my thoughts at my blog, The Endless Knot.