By Anatoly Liberman
Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are. Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin. The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier). The riddles connected with booze are two.
First, why did the noun appear so much later than the verb? A parallel case will elucidate the problem. The verb meet is ancient, while the noun meet is recent, and we can immediately see the reason for the delay: sports journalists needed a word for a “meeting” of athletes and teams and coined a meet, whose popularity infuriated some lovers of English, but, once the purists died out, the word became commonplace (this is how language changes: if a novelty succeeds in surviving its critics, it stays and makes the impression of having been around forever). But the noun booze is not a technical term and should not have waited four hundred years before it joined the vocabulary. Second, the verb booze is a doublet of bouse (it rhymes with carouse, which is fair). Strangely, bouse has all but disappeared, and booze (sorry for a miserable pun) is on everybody’s lips. However, it is not so much the death of bouse that should bother us as the difference in vowels. The vowel we have in cow or round was once “long u” (as in today’s coo). Therefore, bouse has the pronunciation one expects, whereas booze looks Middle English. In the northern dialects of English “long u” did not become a diphthong, and this is probably why uncouth still rhymes with youth instead of south. Is booze a northern doublet of bouse? One can sense Murray’s frustration with this hypothesis. He wrote: “Perhaps really a dialectal form” (and cited a similar Scots word). It is the most uncharacteristic insertion of really that gives away Murray’s dismay. His style, while composing entries, was business-like and crisp; contrary to most people around us, he preferred not to strew his explanations with really, actually, definitely, certainly, and other fluffy adverbs: he was a scholar, not a preacher.
Whatever the causes of the modern pronunciation of booze, one etymology will cover both it and bouse. So what is the origin of bouse? This word is surrounded by numerous nouns and verbs, some of which must be and others may be related to it. First of all, its Dutch and German synonyms buizen and bausen spring to mind. Both are rare to the extent of not being known to most native speakers, but their use in the past has been recorded beyond any doubt. Most other words refer to swelling, violent or erratic movement, and noise: for instance, Dutch buisen “strike, knock” and, on the other hand, beuzelen “dawdle, trifle,” Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible” and bause “put on airs” (which partly explains the sense of Dutch boos and Germa