Rush/Work the Growler (1883, 1884) on Ancestry.com--(Some questions)

[Michael Quinion]

Dave Wilton wrote:

> There is an older sense of "growler," dating to the 1840s and cited in
> HDAS meaning a complainer or complaint. Perhaps the beer can sense
> grew out of this. Could the carry-out customers be more likely to
> grumble and complain (about prices, the fact that their husband drank,
> whatever) than the ordinary bar customers? Could this tendency have
> transferred from the person to the can they were carrying? Just
> speculation without evidence, but it seems a less tortured explanation
> than some of the explanations that have been bandied about.

That might be so, except it doesn't really explain the full phrase
"rush the growler" and the very close association of "growler" with
the container rather than the person carrying it (who was often a
child, at least to go by the citations I've seen).

Jonathon Green wrote:

> As regards slang, the single predecessor of the beer-can growler is
> the use of the word as a synonym for a four-wheeled cab. Given that the
> cab and the can both convey something (people, beer) there appears to
> be at least a feasible link. As for the etymology of growler = cab,
> there are theories that it is a pun on the earlier sulky, another
> conveyance. Which of course brings us back to the image of 'complaints/
> complaining'. On the other hand the 'growls' in both sense may refer to
> a. wheels moving over rough cobblestones, and b. a beer can sliding
> across a bar. FWIW I think the 'noise' links are more likely. I don't
> think that a complaining wife or whoever gives the name to an inanimate
> object. It is the object - cab, beer can - that 'growls', not a person.

Yes, this seems more feasible.

By the way, I have been assuming that we have here a unusual case of
an expression with two completely different sources, in that "rush
the growler" is known from Britain, referring to a pub crawl, whilst
it is almost contemporaneously recorded in the USA referring to
collecting beer in a can from a bar. These are linked, of course, and
one can easily invent a scenario by which the British term might have
been taken to the US (presumably that way, since "growler" is older
in Britain?) and subsequently modified in sense, but it seems a
little improbable, especially in view of the other phrases with
similar senses we've heard about, which are natively American.

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>