grog

Edward Vernon was an admiral in the Royal Navy, a Member of Parliament, and one of the more colorful figures of 18th-century British military life. He was brilliant, combative, politically turbulent, and famous for wearing a boat cloak made of a coarse silk-and-wool fabric called grogram—a word itself derived from the French gros grain (coarse grain). His sailors, with the affectionate irreverence of long-service men everywhere, nicknamed him 'Old Grog' after the cloak he habitually wore.

In 1740, Vice Admiral Vernon issued an order that made him famous in ways he cannot have intended. The Royal Navy had long issued a daily ration of a half-pint of neat rum to each sailor—a tradition that was both a morale tool and a practical solution to the problem of preserving water on long voyages (water went stale; spirits did not). Vernon, concerned about drunkenness and its effects on discipline and seamanship, ordered that the rum ration be diluted: one part rum to three parts water, issued in two portions, morning and evening. To make it more palatable, lemon juice and brown sugar could be added. The mixture was immediately nicknamed 'grog' by the sailors, in mock tribute to the admiral who imposed it.

Vernon's order had consequences far beyond his navy. The addition of citrus juice to grog—lime juice became standard in the British Navy—was one of the earliest systematic preventions of scurvy, the Vitamin C deficiency disease that had killed more sailors than enemy action for centuries. The connection was not yet scientifically understood, but the empirical observation that citrus-drinking sailors survived long voyages better than those without it was real. The grog ration was, inadvertently, a public health measure. British sailors' lime ration eventually gave them the nickname 'limeys,' which persists to this day.

The word grog spread from the Royal Navy into general English usage for any rough or cheap alcoholic drink, and then into adjective form: 'groggy,' meaning dazed and unsteady, first recorded in the 1770s, originally referred to the state of intoxication from grog. Today, 'groggy' has almost completely shed its alcoholic connection—it describes anyone who has just woken from deep sleep or is recovering from anesthesia—but the word carries Old Grog's grogram cloak invisibly inside it.