I just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance after decades, and it was just as good (and cynical) as I remembered — I especially enjoyed Edmond O’Brien as Dutton Peabody, editor of the Shinbone Star who orates about the power of the press as he swigs from a jug of booze. But what drove me to post was the name someone uses for that booze: who-hit-John, which Wiktionary defines as “Hard liquor; whiskey.” Nobody seems to know the origin; it’s not in the OED, and Green’s has only one cite for it, from the ridiculously late date of 1980 (“But without a hangover and a headful of Who-hit-John, it is a different light”), but I like it and will try to remember to use it when the occasion arises.
Also, the river which plays such a role in the movie (gun-slinging cattlemen to the north, law-abiding farmers to the south) is called the Picketwire, which is the wonderfully anglicized name of the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado (though the territory-turned-state in the movie is never named):
The Purgatoire River, also known as Rio de las Ánimas, has had multiple names. It was named by New Mexican Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío in 1719 during his exploration of the region. Valverde named it “Rio de las Ánimas,” meaning “River of the Spirits,” as a warning to subsequent explorers of the dangers of crossing the nearby Ratón Pass. Surviving the crossing, they found water and firewood at the river. Over time, the true meaning of the river’s name became lost, and various interpretations emerged. By the end of the 18th-century Spanish traders believed it to be “Rio de las Ánimas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls in Purgatory,” after a supposed massacre that occurred on its banks. This led to the birth of a legend of the same name that explained its history. French trappers learned the name and later translated it as “Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire.” They related their translation to members of the Stephen H. Long expedition in 1820 who renamed it “Purgatory Creek” by removing all references to souls. Mexican traders on the old Santa Fe Trail expanded on the legend and named the river “Rio de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls Lost in Purgatory,” believing the souls to have become lost. Mountain Men had difficulty pronouncing the French translation and called it “Picatoire,” while Anglophone settlers during the Colorado Gold Rush anglicized it to “Picketwire,” despite the river having no relation to any fence.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the surname Valance, it’s a variant of Vallance: “English and Scottish: of Norman origin a habitational name from Valence in Drôme France named with Latin valentia ‘strength capacity’.”
Who-hit-John made me recall another infelicitous booze name. This may be offensive to some, though apparently the origin was descriptive and accurate. It’s a Maine usage. It’s not in Green’s, but Urban Dictionary has an entry.
Bitch Whiskey
Bitch Whiskey refers to “Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy”, a drink sold in Maine in New Hampshire. It’s various bottle sizes rank Number 1,2,6, and 9th of top selling alcohols in the State of Maine. Especially popular with the women of the state. Also known as Liquid Leg Spreader, Liquid Panty Remover, and when mixed with whole milk, Gorilla Milk and Fat Ass in a Glass
“Who hit John” brings to mind “Who struck John,” which I have heard used (not recently) to mean an endless and pointless debate about assigning blame for something. “The session just turned into a lot of who-struck-John.”
I know “who struck John” as “who shot John” (as in “that’s a lot of who-shot-John”). I understand it originated as British military slang in the 19th century with the meaning assigned by @CuConnacht.
One can certainly imagine (but I can’t find any evidence) how who shot John and who hit John could be connected.
Probably a good idea to avoid this mysterious John character.
I have never been able to pin down the precise meaning of the maxim, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” When *does* the legend become fact?
What an interesting topic! The suggestions by CuConnacht and Ook above are very cogent. The Wiktionary has a cite for who-shot-John ‘bootleg liquor, rotgut’ from 1932, from B. Crawford, ‘Piney Ridge, Virginia’, in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Here is the cite in context:
The semantic development outlined in the Wiktionary at who-shot-John seems satisfactory: ‘long and involved explanation, finger-pointing, or assignment of credit or blame’ > ‘nonsense; rubbish’ > ‘something bad; a mess’ > ‘bootleg liquor’. (Somewhat like French brouille-ménage ‘red wine, plonk’, pousse-au-crime ‘liquor, rotgut’.) Kudos to the Wiktionary editors for that entry!
As far I could discover, the expression does not occur in Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story on which the film was based.
Reminds me of “o-be-joyful” for brandy, which Green’s has as originally nautical jargon.
and when mixed with whole milk, …
Colbert recently mentioned a Coca-Cola promotion of mixing it with milk. He sipped some on-camera and reported it was as nauseous as you’d expect *.
Was this all a wind-up (I’m looking at the USA’s so-called Health Secretary), or were Coke serious?
* Milk Stout does not contain actual milk.
Coca-Cola promotion of mixing it with milk
Well, it could hardly make it worse, could it?
Coca-Cola is basically unforgiveable. It’s the drinkable version of Disney Pooh.
When *does* the legend become fact?
usually right after they print the legend…
(i’ll leave the illustrative
Dearborn IndependentNYTimes citations as an exercise for the reader)I recall drinking a lot of Paralyzers in my misspent youth, composed of Coke, milk (or cream), vodka, and kahlua. Tasted pretty good, but that may be the alcohol talking. Or the youth.
I accidentally watched some Bulgarian news story about some high-school students puking after having snus. It’s as absurd as you can imagine.
From Gerry Souter’s The Earnhardts, a biography of the racecar drivers: “The first batch, heads, and the last batch of a run, tails, were dumped out as toxic and only the middlings were bottled in screw-top Mason jars for sale as Tiger Spit, White Dog, or Corn Squeezin’s. Further west, the clear liquor was often colored with caramel or sometimes dyed reddish brown with a drop or two of iodine and called Busthead or Who-Hit-John.”
I couldn’t find anything before the late 20th century but I didn’t look hard enough.
Y: I quote (well, paraphrase): “smoking cigarettes is a traditional thing Bulgaria”. These “pouches” are not.
Some teenagers had snus and puked.
I shot the sheriff / but I did not shoot the deputy
And the sheriff in that song was named John Brown.
Is “who hit John” supposed to sound like hooch-something? A reference to John Barleycorn?
Some more interesting stuff in a clip from an episode of A Way With Words here. Some background on ‘Billy Patterson’ in Richard Briggs Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America, here.
I am curious about the alleged Purgatoire -> Picatoire shift. What would have rendered the first form too challenging for early 19th c. (Anglophone, and presumably rhotic) “mountain men” to manage? Are there other examples of French-origin toponyms in the U.S. that underwent any similar shift?
Anglophone, and presumably rhotic
Not sure that can be presumed; looking at the first dozen entries in WP’s list of mountain men, most of them seem to have been born in Virginia, and I count at least one Londoner…
I think I knew, and had forgotten, that hooch < hoochinoo, ultimately from the name of a Tlingit village, Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan, per WAry.
I do wonder if who-hit-John is not ultimately a phonetic rendering of some Indian word. As it stands, however, hoochinoo is not a great phonetic match, and there is too much time between the last recorded instance of hoochinoo, ca. 1900, and the first record of who-hit-John, over a half-century later. And that is assuming that who-struck-John is secondary.
Or Purgatoire could have filtered through a trade language to get to Picatoire/Picketwire. It wasn’t because of English phonology that the town at la bouche of the Quillayute River lost its stop voicing on its way to becoming “Lapush.” But getting “Beecham” from “Beauchamp,” I’m prepared to believe English is capable of anything.
When I worked in Reading, it took me a few repetitions to find out that the pub in Bewley was in the village named for Beaulieu Abbey. (And yes, my car nut colleagues would do lunch 60 miles away. Though we usually used less of the day and picked a less distant lunch location).
Does Purgatoire have to be challenging for mountain men to pronounce to account for the folk-etymological shift or just meaningless to them?
I agree, the latter is more plausible. Cf. asparagus > sparrowgrass.
I thought that “Bewley” was the way that “Beaulieu” was originally pronounced in Norman French. That’s what they told me when I visited.
The magnificent David Bowie song is “The Bewlay [not Bewley] Brothers.” Wikipedia says he explained in a subsequent interview that he borrowed the name from that of a (now-defunct) chain of tobacconists named “House of Bewlay,” and the internet yields a photo of the onetime HoB location said to have been at 181 Camden High Stree, with a sign confirming the -ay spelling. (Maybe the one Bowie would have known as a lad elsewhere in Greater London was on Lewisham High Street, but 90 seconds googling didn’t yield a photo of that location.)
Meanwhile, up north of the Border, the medieval-Scottish analogue to Beaulieu Abbey was Beauly Priory, in Inverness-shire. I imagine both Abbey and Priory have experienced some orthographic variation over the centuries.
JWB : Beaulieu –
yes: on Saxton’s map of Hampshire, 1575 you’ll see it’s spelt “Bewley”. I imagine the modern spelling is the result of archaizing sometime.
…flavored brown cottage cheese…?
Coke is seriously acidic. In a chemistry lesson we once boiled some to remove all the carbonic acid. Afterwards, the pH was 2.7 from the phosphoric acid alone. Then the teacher said that was actually illegal, it was supposed to be 3, but they put extra acid in to prevent it from going bad due to all the sugar.
But arrhoticity is younger than that even in England.
That sounds about half right. The e in beau was definitely not silent back then, and a lot of monophthongization hadn’t happened.
(There’s a considerably later work that discusses reasons to write in French as opposed to Latin. One of them is that it’s such a beautiful language because of all those diphthongs…)
Even plain soda water can kill a computer if spilled on a keyboard, in a way plain water would not.
Back to cuchuflete’s mention of “bitch whiskey” as one of the numerous slang synonyms for Maine’s favorite coffee-flavored cheap booze, it turns out that Two Bitch Bourbon is an actual whiskey sold in (some parts of?) the U.S. See https://twobitchspirits.com/pages/our-story. There’s also Thunder Bitch, an “irreverent liqueur” made with an “explosive mixture of premium Canadian whisky, cinnamon and chili.” Not to mention both Sweet Bitch and Feisty Bitch as brands of wine, as well as unmodified Bitch (try the low-priced grenache, if you dare). And Raging Bitch IPA for the beer snobs.
Since the sale of alcoholic beverages is heavily-regulated in the U.S. such that excessively outre brand names could be kept off the store shelves if the regulators were sufficiently irked, this is actually pretty good evidence that “bitch” is just not a very taboo lexeme in the U.S. these days – at least not in the abstract.* (No doubt there are still ways to use it in particular contexts that could create very substantial offense and might lead to serious negative consequences.)
*To be fair, the makers of Raging Bitch had to wage a lengthy lawsuit against the Michigan Liquor Control Commission before they could sell in that state.