COCKTAIL, n. I was at a bar with some friends and one of them said, “Where does the word ‘cocktail’ come from? No, don’t look it up—it can’t possibly be as good as what I’m imagining.” Telling me not to look up a word has never once worked. But if you’re the friend in question, please delete this email and preserve our friendship.
“Cocktail,” as a noun meaning a mixed alcoholic drink, is originally U.S. English, dating from at least the early 1800s. It had a narrower definition at first: a spirit mixed with bitters, water, and sugar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, “cocktail” becomes generic. Becoming a type of drink meant that people had to start naming specific cocktails, like “Manhattan” (1882) and “Martini” (1884).
But why is it called a cocktail? Exciting answer: we’re not totally sure!
Before a cocktail was a mixed drink, it was a horse with a docked tail that stuck up like a rooster’s (yes, that’s the kind of cock we’re talking about—sorry to disappoint). It later came to mean that a racehorse was not a thoroughbred, and then after that, it became an adjective that meant “lacking in good breeding” or improper. (That usage is obsolete now.) The OED says this notion of not being a thoroughbred—not being purely one thing—is probably what led to the “mixed drink” meaning.
The Online Etymology Dictionary mentions the possible “not thoroughbred” origin, but adds another: mixed drinks were also called “gingers” around the turn of the nineteenth century, not because they contained the spice ginger (a logical guess) or even the alcohol gin (also a good try), but because they made drinkers livelier, much like shoving a piece of ginger into a horse’s anus will make the horse livelier. I am not making this up. There’s even a special verb for torturing your horse in this way: to feague. (If you’re wondering whether “feague” is the etymological origin for the kink called “figging,” in which one does this to a human being instead of a horse, Wikipedia says yes.)
Anyway, if you feague a horse, it will often cock its tail up, hence “cocktail,” a thing that makes you lively. To be honest, this etymology for cocktail strikes me as less likely than the first one—it’s a bit convoluted and doesn’t make the cut in the OED’s “cocktail” entry—but I couldn’t not tell you about it.
There you have it. Two possible etymologies for cocktail. Fewer roosters and penises than I expected, but more horses and assholes.
In Capital-R Romance—yes! I haven’t done this section in months, so in case you’ve never encountered it before, this is where I talk about things I’ve read in French (or, on rare occasions, other Romance languages)—I finally finished Théophile Gautier’s 1835 queer/trans sexy heartbreaker of novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. In a previous newsletter, I discussed the novel’s famous “art for art’s sake” preface and its first few chapters.
I can’t say I recommend it. One third of it is fantastic: a nonbinary babe, Madeleine de Maupin/Théodore de Serannes, runs around France getting into sword duels and doomed romances. What’s not to love? Two thirds of it is a melancholy poet character, d’Albert, writing long, long letters about his own identity and his ideals of beauty. I gave d’Albert a chance, but after too many pages of “no earthly woman is beautiful enough to satisfy me,” I didn’t find him terribly compelling or sympathetic. The prose is delicious, but reading d’Albert’s letters is like trying to eat an entire cake in one sitting. That’s why you last saw me write about this novel in March. I got bored of cake.
Mademoiselle de Maupin feels to me, as older queer fiction often does, as though it’s starting from zero. D’Albert needs hundreds of pages to explain or justify to the reader his curious and unnameable feelings of exclusion and ennui and otherness, his yearning for feminine beauty in ideal/imaginary/impossible situations (including in his own body) and finding it unsatisfactory in women he knows, and his horror at feeling attraction for a person he perceives as a man. Whereas I, a reader in 2023, am like, girl I get it. Can we have some plot now, please?
Théodore, in contrast to d’Albert, flirts or fights all the time. As it turns out, they have flirted their way into the heart of both d’Albert and a woman named Rosette, with whom d’Albert is having a loveless sexual affair. Théodore’s arrival makes both Rosette and d’Albert jealous.
The whole novel gets better when Théodore shows up—especially when they narrate. The novel has a hybrid structure; it’s mostly epistolary, with letters written either by d’Albert or Théodore/Madeleine, but there are occasional third-person prose parts or even sections written like the script for a play. Refusal to be confined to a single gender/genre category, you see how it is. Love to see a book wrestle with the limits of its form.
There’s a really wonderful bit near the end where the characters stage a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (previously discussed in this very newsletter) and of course d’Albert plays Orlando and Théodore/Madeleine plays Rosalind. What if you were a woman living as a man who played a woman dressed up as a man dressed up as a woman—and really you were all or none of those? Théodore/Madeleine gives many successive, varying descriptions of themself, but one of the most interesting to me is that they say, were they to take up wearing skirts again, “instead of a woman disguised as a man, I would seem like a man disguised as a woman” (my translation). They have destabilized the categories so thoroughly that there is no going back: “I am of a third, separate sex that does not have a name yet” (my translation).
When d’Albert and Théodore finally have sex, Théodore, who no longer owns any feminine clothing, wears the Rosalind costume again. This section is narrated in third-person and the narrator refers to Théodore exclusively as Rosalind. You could read this sex scene—which is surprisingly explicit for 1835—as a reveal and confirmation of womanhood, since there’s a lot of emphasis on nudity and breasts and curves and delicacy, but to me it feels more doubtful than that. Even naked, a role is being played.
D’Albert doesn’t really get to have Théodore/Rosalind. He certainly doesn’t get to keep them. They leave his bed for Rosette’s in the room next door, where they remain for hours, and while readers are not privy to what happens there (perhaps because Gautier feared censorship, unlike in the sex scene with d’Albert), the narrator reveals that the sheets bear the imprint of two figures. The maid who cleaned the room showed him “two pearls, perfectly similar to what Théodore wore in his hair in playing the role of Rosalind. She had found them in the bed while making it.” So Théodore sheds their Rosalind costume and leaves behind two small, round, typical feminine decorations—common metaphors for the clitoris, but also two little white droplets spilled into the dirty sheets like semen.
There is, in the end, sexual pleasure but no lasting romance between either Théodore and d’Albert or Théodore and Rosette. The romance, it seems, must be between d’Albert and Rosette, but don’t mistake this for simple heterosexuality. There’s no going back. Their love is only possible through the memory of Théodore, who leaves with a note telling them to “love each other and sometimes say my name in a kiss.”
Speaking of kisses and playing roles, here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Acting Up (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Adele Buck. This romance between a director and a stage manager who’ve been friends and colleagues for years has banter to die for. They’re always quoting plays at each other, which I appreciated even though my own theatrical knowledge is sadly lacking. Plus it’s got that good, good “I can’t bear the thought of ruining our working relationship or our friendship so I’ll just repress how in love with you I am” friends-to-lovers pining. And an epistolary element between two very funny supporting characters who are emailing back and forth to comment on the action. The theatre setting felt very grounded to me, as did the small Connecticut town where they’re putting on the play. This was a ton of fun.
The Honeymoon Mix-up (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary) by Frankie Fyre. Don’t you wish you were vacationing on a tropical island with your beautiful wife? I do. I wouldn’t even care if we were faking being married in order to stay at a lesbian couples’ resort. I might care a little bit if it turned out my beautiful fake wife was actually a private investigator hired to tail me, but honestly if we’d been through what Basil (white, femme, uptight, ambitious, trying to close a business deal with the resort) and Caroline (Black, masc, laidback, funny, just trying to get paid for the PI work she’s starting to have serious doubts about) had been through, I’d probably forgive her. This is silly and heartfelt and very sexy.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Mosab Abu Toha’s 2022 poetry collection Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear, which was beautiful and heartwrenching. I highly recommend it. Abu Toha is Palestinian, Gazan specifically. He was a visiting poet at Harvard in 2020. Two weeks ago he was abducted, stripped, beaten, and detained by the IDF. He survived and was able to flee Gaza with his wife and three young children, but is separated from his parents, siblings, other relatives, and friends, who, like everyone in Gaza, are subject to Israel’s onslaught of violence and deprivation there.
Here is one of his poems.
ON A STARLESS NIGHT
On a starless night,
I toss and turn.
The earth shakes, and
I fall out of bed.
I look out my window. The house
next door no longer
stands. It’s lying like an old carpet
on the floor of the earth,
trampled by missiles, fat slippers
flying off legless feet.
I never knew my neighbors still had that small TV,
that the old painting still hung on their walls,
that their cat had kittens.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks.
