Three Anglo-Norman Etymologies: Booze, Gear, and Gin

Abstract

AS with so many words in the register that English booze now occupies, there is a variety of fanciful—not to say far-fetched—proposals as to origin, few rooted in any historical context. Some of these will be passed in review below, more to illustrate the workings of popular etymologizing (not always quite the same thing as ‘folk etymology’) than to provide a new solution to what has been thus far viewed as an all-but-solved problem. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the soberest assessment of the etymology of the verb to bouse, bowse, seen as the source of the noun booze. It is reproduced below in lightly edited and slightly abbreviated form: ME. bousen, apparently adapted from MDu. bûsen, early mod.Du. buizen ‘to drink to excess’, corresp. to Ger. bausen in same sense. The origin is not quite clear … the Du. [form] seems directly related to buise ‘a large drinking-vessel’. Both vb. and n. occur … in ME. but they seem to have become generally known in 16th c. as words of thieves’ and beggars’ cant, whence they passed into slang and colloquial use. … since 18th c. often phonetically written BOOZE.1