“Haiffand ilk werk day ane half hour afor nyne houris afor none to his disjone, and ane othir half hour afor four houris eftyr none to his nunschankis.”
That’s a sentence written in Scotland in 1529. Besides being a sort of dreamlike window into the world five hundred years ago, the sentence includes a very interesting word: nunshankis.” What it means is a “schench” at noon. The word “schench” is obsolete nowadays, but the thing it describes is far from it. A “schench” is a drink. Alcoholic, that is. So five hundred years ago, there was almost certainly the equivalent of the “two martini lunch” made famous by the ad agency culture of 1960s Madison Avenue, Manhattan. Not to mention Bond — James Bond (and right there is a bit of connection to Scotland…never mind).
If you look up “nunshankis” in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll discover that the practice of a drink or two during the daylight hours has been common enough over the centuries that this one word has FIFTY-SEVEN different spellings. Possibly people tended to write about it after their own nunshankis. But there’s one variation that’s not quite as obsolete as the rest of them: “nuncheon.” It closely resembles “luncheon,” and it’s still occasionally used to this day. Because it’s so rare, and because of the context in which it’s used, most people who encounter it probably assume it’s a variation on “luncheon” and means something to eat. You, on the other hand, now know better!
Another word about the same general topic is “tipple.” It’s not the most common of words, but you’re more likely to encounter it than “nuncheon,” and FAR more likely to run into it than “nunshankis.” “Tipple” is a noun meaning an alcoholic drink as well as a verb meaning to drink it. It comes from the Middle English “tipeler,” which meant “tapster,” the fellow who tapped a keg of ale to pour out pints, as they still say in England. “Tapster” is also still a word in its own right; it’s a bartender. It comes from the Old English “taeppestre,” which seems to have meant the same thing. Humans have been drinking for a long time, after all; the consensus among Egyptologists is that the pyramid builders were fueled by beer and bread.
Judging by the age of many of the English words about drinking, it’s been an important subject to people since they’ve been able to talk. Most of the words go back at least as far as Old English, and if they don’t it’s usually because the kind of beverage being referred to is a more recent invention. “Whisky,” for example, goes back to Latin and means “the water of life,” but the word “gin” is only a few centuries old — and so is gin.
Gin has a bit of a story as well. It’s short for “geneva,” which comes from the Latin word for juniper. Juniper berries are used in making the stuff. Gin was pretty cheap and available back in the day (not that you can’t get some within about a half mile of wherever you might happen to be nowadays), and for a while, in the Middle Ages (at least in London), the story goes that there were vendors who walked the city with carts selling gin (“geneva”) all day long, and practically everybody, of any age, visited these carts and bought as much as they could afford. Which suggests that maybe one of the reasons that it took so ridiculously long for the Renaissance and Enlightenment to arrive was simply that most people, most of the time, were drunk. Nice prefrontal cortex your species has evolved — be a shame if something happened to it, eh? Because after all, if you have to work a nine hour day, nobody should expect you to go more than four of them without a drink.
