"The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail"

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From Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster at The Endless Knot, 50 minutes on "The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail":


Mark Sudaram describes himself as

…an interdisciplinarian, medievalist, philologist, linguist, academic, musician, and philosophical layabout. He is the co-host of the Endless Knot Podcast and is the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel and this website; he writes the scripts and creates the videos, including writing and recording the music. He is @Alliterative on Twitter. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.

Consistent with that perspective, the first few minutes of the video are mostly etymology, and additional word-origin digressions occur throughout, for example a history of the word "scandal" starting with the Proto-Indo-European origins of its stem, and a similar history of "tabloid".

The cocktail's history is indeed full of scandalous associations. And you may perceive some resonances with current events, though apparently without any new mixed drinks.



5 Comments »

  1. bks said,

    January 19, 2025 @ 4:00 pm

    Surprised that the narrator is not familiar with the NYC pronunciation of Houston St.

  2. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 19, 2025 @ 7:19 pm

    This fellow's idiolect seems initially unmarked, i.e. very much the current American-elite style of pronunciation. Except he is very heavy-handedly "trying too hard," and would be less annoying-sounding if he had an idiolect with one or more non-elite connotations or, as the Young People say, vibes. (Like, to pat myself on the back, my own limited set of Philadelphia-regional pronunciation oddities such as GOAT-fronting that deviate from an otherwise boringly standard/prestige idiolect.) He sounds exactly like he's reading aloud the results of a prompt given to a more-competent-than-average AI large language model, and has not actually written his own script.

  3. azt said,

    January 19, 2025 @ 7:56 pm

    @JWBrewer: It's just Canada-speak. What an ungracious critique.

  4. JPL said,

    January 20, 2025 @ 12:01 am

    With such a disappointed reaction to the man's speech pattern, and such a remonstrative response to the description of that reaction, I had to just see for myself what the fuss was about, and on hearing just the greeting I heard him pronounce "knot" and "cocktail", and I said, "That's Ontario all right".

  5. SlideSF said,

    January 20, 2025 @ 12:48 pm

    I thought "Canadian" from his first use of the words "knot", "iconic", and "cocktail". The deal was sealed when I saw the illustration of the Manhattan and the whisky presented was Crown Royal. I can't imagine too many bars south of the border would use that as a base, least of all in Manhattan (though to his credit, he does touch upon that).

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