A glass and bottle of Highland Park Scotch whisky sitting on a wooden surface
16 November 2022
A stiff drink is a strong, alcoholic one. The idiom is odd to present-day ears because stiff once had a sense meaning strong that isn’t used much anymore, except in the context of booze.
The adjective stiff, meaning rigid, unbending traces back to Old English stif. And the word retains that as its primary meaning through to the present day. But in the Middle English period, stiff began to be used to mean strong. For instance, the word is used in that sense to describe the physical prowess of William the Conqueror in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, c.1300:
Suiþe þikke mon he was · & of grete strengþe
Gret wombede & ballede · & bote of euene lengþe
So stif mon he was in armes · in ssoldren & in lende
Þat vnneþe enimon · miȝte is bowe bende(Such a stout man he was and of great strength
Great bellied and bald but well proportioned
So stiff a man he was in arms, in shoulders and in loins
That scarcely any man might bend his bow)
Stiff starts to be associated with alcohol by the end of the sixteenth century, at first in the phrase stiff drinkers, that is to say hard or inveterate drinkers. From a song in John Lyly’s 1594 masque Mother Bombie:
IO Bacchus! To thy Table.
Thou call'st euery drunken Rabble,
We already are stiffe Drinkers,
Then seale vs for thy iolly Skinckers.
We see it in another song performed in a masque, this time in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Auguries. The masque was first published in 1622, but while that edition references the song, it does not include its lyrics. The lyrics appear in the 1640 compilation of Jonson’s works:
From Court we invite
Lord, Ladie, and knight;
Squire, gentleman [sic], yeoman and groom.
And all our stiffe drinkers,
Smiths, Porters, and Tinkers,
And the beggars shall give ye roome.
We see stiff applied to the booze itself by the end of the eighteenth century. There is this use of glass of stiff grog from an obituary of a British sailor that appeared in the February 1791 edition of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:
At Chatham, Mr. William Ewin, boatswain of his Majesty’s ship Bristol. He was boatswain of the Resolution, with Captain Cook, on his last voyage to the South Seas, and had been with him on his expedition in search of the Southern continent. His character was that of an intrepid, good seamen [sic], never afraid of a stiff gale, yet always better pleased with a glass of stiff grog.
And we have stiff drink of grog in Parson Weems’s 1808 edition of his biography of George Washington. It may appear in earlier editions of that work, but this is the earliest one I’ve found. Weems is describing an incident that occurred during the June 1776 British attack on Charleston, South Carolina. The British force, under the command of Commodore Peter Parker, was driven away by American gunnery. Not only were the British forced to retreat, but Parker lost his pants in the battle, shredded by gunfire. Much mockery was made of this at the time, although it was undeserved. It happened when Parker ordered his quarterdeck cleared of everyone but himself and the intense gunfire shredded his pants. It was a brave act, and he was lucky not to have been killed. Anyway, the following is Weems’s description of an exchange that occurred between Parker and one of the Black pilots he had brought on board to navigate the Charleston channel as they British squadron retreated. I don’t reproduce Weems’s transcript of the actual conversation because it is not strictly relevant to our point here and is incredibly racist:
This was right down impudence: and Cudjo richly deserved a ropes-end for it; but Sir Peter, a good natured man, was so tickled with the idea of measuring the Atlantic Ocean with a quart pot, that he broke into a hearty laugh, and ordered Cudjo a stiff drink of grog.
There is this poem, titled A Glass of Gin Toddy, that appeared in Virginia’s Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser on 1 December 1818:
Should you be in the dumps,
Or your wife have the mumps,
Which frequently will happen to a body;
Let it be day or night,
And you want to set things right,
Just swallow a stiff drink of gin toddy.
And there is this satirical Apology for Drunkenness that appeared in Vermont’s Woodstock Observer on 17 July 1821:
Drunkenness promotes Religion in general and humanity in particular—Because some men have no religion until they obtain a stiff drink of grog, and their religion increases in proportion to the quantity of spirits which they may imbibe, until at length they become so extremely religious and humble, as to wallow in the mud along with hogs, for the edification of the spectators.
So that’s where we get stiff drink from. It’s just a fossilized noun phrase that uses an obsolescent sense of stiff meaning strong.
There is a tale that says stiff drink comes from the practice of transporting corpses in spirits to preserve them for later burial. Supposedly, hard drinkers would surreptitiously sneak a drink from the cask containing the stiff. The story is nonsense, mostly. Occasionally, a corpse of a wealthy or famous person who died far from home would be preserved in spirits. Horatio Nelson was so preserved following his death at Trafalgar so he could have a funeral in England. But the practice was not common. And while one cannot discount the lengths an alcoholic will go to get a drink, actually drinking the preserving spirits would be even rarer. It’s not the origin of the phrase, just a post-hoc rationalization/joke.
Sources:
“Apology for Drunkenness.” Woodstock Observer (Vermont), 17 July 1821, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Deaths.” Gentleman’s Magazine (London), February 1791, 187. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
“A Glass of Gin Toddy.” Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Virginia), 1 December 1818, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Jonson, Benjamin. “The Masque of Auguries.” The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, vol. 2, London: Richard Meighen, 1640, 85. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Lyly, John. Mother Bombie. London: Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby, 1594, 2.1, sig. C4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. stif, adj.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. stiff, adj., n., and adv.
Robert of Gloucester. Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. William Aldis Wright, ed. London: Stationery Office, 1887, lines 7730–33, 556.
Weems, Mason Locke. The Life of George Washington, sixth edition. Philadelphia: R. Cochran, 1808, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Niklas Morberg, 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.