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• whiskey •

Pronunciation:[h]wis-kee • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: An alcoholic liquor distilled from grain (barley, rye, corn) and containing 40-50% ethyl alcohol.

Notes: The plural of today's Good Word is whiskeys. It has a variant spelled without the E, whisky. The plural of this variant is whiskies. Either spelling comes with two seldom heard or seen adjectives, whiskeyed or whiskied, and whiskeyish or whiskyish. Either set of adjectives means "soaked in or tainted with whiskey".

In Play: We have conjured up many excuses for drinking whiskey: "Jim Beam claims to have been fighting a cold with whiskey for twenty years, because his father told him that whiskey was the best cure for that ailment." (Should it take twenty years?) My spellchecker doesn't like any of the four adjectives mentioned in the Notes, but the Oxford English Dictionary does: "I can't come home from the bar all whiskeyed up, because my wife always meets me at the door."

Word History: Today's Good Word shares its origin with English water, the Proto-Indo-European root, wod-/wed-/ud- "water, wet". English reaped the benefits of all three of the original word's forms. The O-variant, wod-, went into the making of water, with the addition of the ubiquitous suffix -er. The bare E-variant became wet in English. The way English came by the third variant, ud-, was a bit more serpentine. Gaelic chose the ud- root with the suffix -skio attached, from which it produced usque "water". Whiskey is a shortened form of usquebaugh from the Scottish (or Irish) Gaelic phrase uisge beatha "water of life". This expression followed the example of Latin aqua vitae "water of life", still alive in all the Scandinavian languages as akvavit. Finally, as mentioned in the Good Word hogwash, the Russian word for "water" is voda. Vodka is a diminutive of this word, basically meaning "a small water". How's that for a euphemism? (Let's all raise a glass of the water of life to Eric Berntson for his recommendation of today's first-rate Good Word.)

WHISKEY RETURNS

Whiskey: I have returned to the fold, father.

Dr. Goodword: Welcome home, my son. (embracing)

Whiskey: I won't be punished, father?

Dr. Goodword: You are forgiven your darkest misdeed, my son. Fear not.

Whiskey: What about those two Southern preachers over there? What about them? (pointing and trembling)

Dr. Goodword: They have bathed in the gentle waters of Mercy, my son.

Whiskey: And those Sunday School kids? And their teachers?

Dr. Goodword: They will not harm you.

Whiskey: Then I am truly forgiven!?

Dr. Goodword: Truly.

Whiskey: Let's have a drink on it, then!!


from The Apocrypha of MTC

Spelling of Whisky. In Ireland and the U.S. it is Whiskey. In Scotland, Canada, and most of the English-speaking world it is Whisky. - H.

"If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck,
I'd swim to the bottom and never come up."
- Redneck song

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