"grog"

[Michael Quinion]

Joel S. Berson wrote:

> The OED has as its first quotations 1770 and 1773, and the etymology
> from Vernon's grogram.  But there is the claim that "two earlier
> examples are known, in an 1818 book by Daniel Defoe and in one of the
> Roxburghe Ballads, said to date from 1672-85. However, it is not
> possible to substantiate either" (World Wide Words, Michael Quinion,
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gro4.htm).  Wikipedia says the
> Defoe work is "The Family Instructor", but does not give publication
> details (article "Grog").
>
> First, the "1818" is an error.  Defoe is 1661?--1731, 1818 is not 22
> years before Vernon, and there are editions of "The Family
> Instructor" from 1715 -- although there is a 1718 edition (ESTC)
>
> Second, why has it not been possible to substantiate Defoe?  Simply
> because no-one has gone to read an edition?  Does ECCO or EEBO
> contain an edition earlier than 1740?

I was told about the two possible antedatings only after I wrote the
"grog" piece and I then looked into them in some detail, putting a
detailed note in a later issue of the newsletter (but not online).

Wikipedia says it is in Daniel Defoe's The Family Instructor of 1718,
which has a Barbados slave boy say that "black men" in the West Indies
"make the sugar, make the grog, much great work, much weary work all day
long." However, the Defoe citation is given in later editions of the book
and in quotations from it (I'm still trying to get access to a first
edition) not as Wikipedia cites it, but as "makee the sugar, makee the
ginger; much great work, weary work, all day, all night". This looks like
sloppy citing rather than a later revision of the work.

The Roxburghe Ballads citation appears in volume 7, edited by Joseph
Ebsworth and published in 1893, in a ballad whose title is Pensive Maid
and whose date is given as 1672-85: "In a public-house then they both sot
down / And talk'd of admirals of high renown / And drunk'd as  much grog
as come to half-a-crown." Ebsworth was a scrupulous editor, and his dating
ought to be on the mark (though I can't find any date for the ballad in
the volume). But it's a one-off example in a collection bedevilled by
fakes and which has later additions (there's one about the 1745 Jacobite
rebellion, for example). The reference to admirals, and the general tone
of the piece, hints that it might have been written after 1740 in
knowledge of the Vernon tale. The only firm date I have is that the ballad
must be older than its reproduction in a book of comic songs of 1818
compiled by Thomas Hudson.


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

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