Thinking about the term “soft drinks,” I got to pondering over how and when we use phrase “hard drinks” in English.  I just compared the number of Google citations for “hard drinks” vs. “soft drinks” in English, ca. 46,800 (hard) to ca. 5,780,000 (soft) – an interesting contrast.  “Hard liquor” gives about 581,000 hits but “soft liquor,” an actual but obscur-ish term, gives only about 330.  How about a comparison of the Irish terms?

 

Actually, I don’t really see any evidence for Irish using a term “hard (intoxicating) drinks” that literally  uses any of the main adjectives for “hard” in Irish.  So, let’s see what the basic terms for “hard” would be, and if they’re ever used regarding beverages:

 

crua, used in both the physical sense, as in “uisce crua,” “cruabhruite” (if speaking of an ubh, but probably not regarding detectives!), and “crua le mothú,” and in the abstract sense, as in obair chrua or geimhreadh crua.

 

deacair, mostly in the abstract sense, similar to “difficult,” as in “Tá sin deacair a thuiscint” (That’s hard to understand). 

 

doiligh, similar to “deacair,” but mostly found, in my experience, more in Donegal or Northern Irish), as in “Tá sin doiligh a thuigbheáil” (That’s hard to understand).

 

Just to double-check, I also looked for any references online to “drinks” with “crua” and found only one hit, in an unusual site, “epaloids,” that appears to be half in a Pilipino language and half in Irish, with a lot of the Irish strictly following English word order (“i an” instead of “sa,” etc.).  The Irish I found there isn’t such to make me think that “crua” has really entered the lexicon for describing beverages in Irish.  

 

So, we’ll be sticking to the phrase, “deochanna meisciúla” here and end up comparing that to “deochanna neamh-mheisciúla,”  “deochanna boga,” and “deochanna glasa.”

 

A rough search on the Idirlíon yields about 1090 hits for the phrase “deochanna meisciúla,” many of which have to do with “An tAcht Deochanna Meisciúla” (The Intoxicating Liquor Act), or the related “bille.”  Removing those, from the search leaves me with about 39 actual hits concerning “deochanna meisciúla” in a more general sense.   

 

A search for “deochanna boga” gives me about 79 results.  “Deochanna glasa” seems to be fading out of use as a term, since its hits are remarkably fewer, five, in fact.  And two of those are from previous blaganna in this series!  The other three are from government statistical orders from the 1970s and 1980s.  “Deochanna neamh-mheisciúla,” admittedly a bit of a mouthful compared to either “boga” or “glasa,” gives me 13 hits and is a more formal term.   

 

Why were drinks “glas” anyway?  The adjective “glas” normally means “green” (leaves, plants, etc.) or “gray” (animals), so this use is presumably from its extended meanings, like “unseasoned,” “immature,” “raw,” or “sickly-hued.” 

 

How about in the singular?  The trend is similar although the pool of results is far smaller: deoch bhog (19 hits, after eliminating duplicates, etc.) and deoch ghlas (5 hits).  “Deoch neamh-mheisciúil” gave a grand total of faic, náid, nialas, or as we like to add to such enumerations in English, zip, zilch, or jack (leaving out the less savory, i.e. sweet, variations of such phrases)!

 

So the upshot of it all seems to be that English tends to prefer the phrases “hard liquor” and “soft drinks” although both “soft liquor” and “hard drinks” do exist, at least as terms.  Irish seems to see the alcoholic drinks as “intoxicating” (meisciúil) rather than “hard” as such.  Nonetheless, “bog” (soft), as an opposite to the term “crua” even though “crua” isn’t used. has entered the language to describe non-alcoholic drinks, and seems to gradually be displacing the more traditional concept of “glas.”

 

As for the “shot” itself, as opposed to the “upshot,” that’s a “glincín,” but more on the measurements and containers for all these deochanna in another blog.   

 

Some day, I’ll extend this research to cover biotáillí (“spirituous” liquor) and the term for alcohol itself, but this is go leor for now.  And yes, I know that Googling terms like this certainly doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of word usage today or in the past, but it is one sort of practical and insightful linguistic bar(GROAN!)ometer, at any rate! 

 

 

Nótaí: acht, act (in government); bruite, boiled or cooked; le mothú, to touch; geimhreadh [GYEV-ruh] winter; neamh-, non-;