Discussion:cocktail
Autres discussions sur ce mot modifier
Origine douteuse modifier
Vous présentez comme une certitude que l’origine du mot cocktail est coquetier.
Et vous prenez comme source etymonline.com.
Pourtant ce dictionnaire emploie le mot perhaps (peut-être), ce qui veut bien dire qu’il ne s’agit que d’une origine possible.
De plus, si vous aviez fait les choses sérieusement, pour ne pas dire honnêtement, vous vous seriez intéressé à la source d’etymonline.com.
Et cette source met elle-même en doute l’origine en question, après l’avoir rapportée.
Voici ce qu’écrit H. L. Mencken dans The Vocabulary of the Drinking Chamber (New Yorker Magazine; Nov. 6, 1948) après avoir évoqué l’histoire d’Antoine Amédée Peychaud et de ses coquetiers :
« A greater difficulty lies in the fact that the searchers for the “Dictionary of American English” unearthed a plain mention of the cocktail in the Hudson (N. Y.) Balance for May 13, 1806, in which it was defined as “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”
How did Peychaud’s invention, if it was his invention, make its way from New Orleans to so remote a place as Hudson, New York, in so short a time, and how did it become generalized on the way?
At the start of its journey it was a concoction of very precise composition - as much so as the Martini or Manhattan of today - but in a very few years it was popping up more than a thousand miles away, with an algebraic formula, x + C 12 H 22 O 11 + H 2 O + y, that can be developed, by substitution, into almost countless other formulas, all of them making authentic cocktails. Given any hard liquor, any diluent, and any addition of aromatic flavoring, and you have one instantly.
What puzzles me is how this massive fact, so revolutionary in human history and so conducive to human happiness, jumped so quickly from New Orleans to the Hudson Valley.
It seems much more likely that the cocktail was actually known and esteemed in the Albany region some time before Peychaud shook up his first Sazerac on the lower Mississippi. »