Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [3]
sack: A strong Spanish wine, the antecedent of sherry. The term may also apply to sweet wines from Madeira, Malaga, and the Canary Islands. Favored by Shakespeare’s Fal-EDITOR’Sstaff, likely for its assertive alcohol content, as high as 16 percent.
Sassenach: a term (a bit derogatory) used by Scots to describe the English
SDP: Social Democratic Party
short drink: a lowball
slag: a drunken slattern; alternatively, a thrifty connoisseuress of drink
slivovitz: a colorless, brandy-like, and extremely dangerous alcohol made from fermented plum juice
sod: see toper
spanking: new and delightful
squash: a concentrated syrup made of filtered fruit juice, most commonly orange, lime, or blackcurrant, served in cocktails with water, seltzer, spirits, or a combination thereof
stand-up party: as opposed to a dinner party, a gathering at which food is served buffet-style
stroppy: impertinent
stune: in Irish slang, a college’s student union
toper: drunkard; sot; convivial person
tot: one-thirtieth of a bottle of liquor; 25 ml
VAT: value-added tax
Worthington: English brewery noted for its Worthington’s White Shield ale, a traditional IPA-style brew. Now owned by Coors, which still sells White Shield as a specialty ale.
yobbo: according to the OED, “a rude and loutish young man”
On Drink
INTRODUCTION
ANTHROPOLOGISTS ASSURE US that wherever we find man he speaks. Chimpanzee-lovers notwithstanding, no animal other than man is capable of laughter. And, although some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian jungle might conceivably prove an exception tomorrow, every present-day society uses alcohol, as have the majority of those of the past. I am not denying that we share other important pleasures with the brute creation, merely stating the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.
There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate. A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War. Not only is drink here to stay; the moral seems to be that when it goes, we go too.
It has certainly increased its hold on our lives with the world-wide move to the towns and the general increase in prosperity. Wine and beer are—in origin, in the countries that produce them—drinks of the village and the poorer classes; gin and whisky belong to the city and, these days at any rate, the rather better off. In other words, our drinks are getting stronger as well as more numerous.
The strains and stresses of urban living, to coin a phrase, are usually held accountable for these increases. I should not dissent from this exactly, but I should single out one stress (or strain) as distinctly more burdensome, and also more widespread, than most: sudden confrontation with complete or comparative strangers in circumstances requiring a show of relaxation and amiability—an experience that I, for one, never look forward to without misgiving, even though I nearly always turn out to enjoy it in the event. While the village remained the social unit, strangers appeared seldom, and when they did were heavily outnumbered by your family, your friends, people you had known all your life. Nowadays, in the era of the business lunch, the dinner party, the office party, the anything-and-everything party, strangers pour over the horizon all the time.
The reason why I, and most others,