"rush the growler"

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

In his latest "World Wide Words" item, Michael Quinion treats "rush the growler" and says no one knows where it comes from.  I refer him to the article which Barry Popik and I wrote on the subject: "_Rush the growler_: towards a compilation of treatments on this expression." in: _Studies in Slang_,  VI,  (by Gerald Leonard Cohen and Barry A. Popik), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999, pp. 1-20.

    Below my signoff is M. Quinion's treatment of  "rush the growler".

Gerald Cohen

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[M. Quinion's "rush the growler" item]:

Q. There's an old drinking song that goes like this: "There was a
little man who had a little can, and he used to rush the growler.
He stuck his head in the barroom door, and he heard somebody
holler, 'No beer today! No beer today! You can't get beer on
Sunday. No beer today! No beer today! Just bring around the can on
Monday.'" I have long wondered what "rush the growler" means. I
suspect it may be a Prohibition reference, but I don't know what it
means. Can you help? [Mia Shinbrot]

A. I can help to some extent. To "rush the growler" (sometimes to
"roll the growler" and other forms) was to take a container to the
local bar to buy beer. The growler was the container, usually a tin
can. Brander Matthews wrote about it in Harper's Magazine in July
1893: "In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a bar-room
is called a "growler", and the act of sending this can from the
private house to the public-house and back is called "working the
growler"". The job of rushing the growler was often given to
children.

It's certainly older than the Prohibition era: the first reference
to it appeared in print around 1885. By 1900 it had started to be
used in newspapers and had clearly moved away from being slang.
However, James Greenough and George Kittredge wrote in Words and
Their Ways in English Speech in 1901 that, "A score of such
references might make the reader forget that this most
objectionable expression ever was slang, or had any offensive
associations". What offensive associations? A clue is in the
Atlantic Monthly for February 1899: "It sometimes seems unfortunate
to break down the second standard, which holds that people who
'rush the growler' are not worthy of charity, and that there is a
certain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse". The very
first recorded example, from the magazine Puck in May 1885,
reinforces this, "The old, old story. The happy home, loving
parents, the growler, the fall and ruin". So people who indulged in
"growler-rushing" were thought to be on the slippery slope towards
destitution and self-destruction.

You're waiting, of course, for me to tell you where "growler" came
from. The noise you hear is me shuffling my feet in embarrassment.
Nobody knows.