ep02 Grog in 1740

It was originally a pretty chattin' roll. An eleven-year-old boy goes thirty feet into a well to save a baby. The composer, up I'll take you home again, Kathleen, really meant what he wrote. Can you imagine that?

Yes, friends, this is Lindsay McCarry back once more with another batch of stranger than fiction facts with which to astound in a major. We've dug up some more fascinating peculiarities of this old world of ours and in just a moment or two, my cohorts and I will be back with you to present them.

Yes, sir, we're back. Now, on most of these can you imagine that broadcast, we're going to give you the picturesque

origin of some word now in common usage in the English language. The word grogg today means any hard liquor or alcoholic beverage. Now, I wonder how many of you know how grogg came to possess its present meaning.

Well, it goes away back almost 200 years to the year 1740. Let's imagine ourselves back in that year on board an English man of war, somewhere on the high seas. Oh, this is a night for work, Leddy.

You'll be earning your pay in food this night. Wind's stirring up the sea like a witch's broth. Oh, look alive there. Oh, Grog will be coming on deck soon. Oh, look alive. Old Grog? You mean Admiral Vernon.

They say, Millad, Admiral Vernon. Him and his Grogram cloak. Grogram, Grog? I Grogram cloak, half-wall and half-mowhere. So they say, he wears it in foul weather. We call him Old Grog. But a better sailor never set foot on Oak decks, and a tougher Admiral never commanded a ship.