Names for the Part Tea, Part Lemonade Drink

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Drew from Washington, D.C. How are you guys?

Hey, Drew. How are you doing?

I’m doing really well. I’m really excited to be on today.

Oh, yeah. We’re glad to have you. Welcome. What is on your mind?

Okay, so a few years ago, I went to a Cracker Barrel with my family.

Well, what I wanted was I wanted a mix of lemonade and iced tea.

I’ve always called that half and half.

So when I ordered a half and half, I was expecting a lemonade-iced tea combo.

But they gave me what was seemingly a mix of sweet tea and unsweet tea.

When I asked the waitress, like, oh, I don’t think this is what I’d ordered.

She was like, oh, this is what I thought you said.

When you said half and half, this is what I thought you meant.

And then she was like, yeah, like, I know those as Arnold Palmer’s.

And I was like, interesting.

I had heard those kind of before, but I thought half and half was kind of well-known as a term.

And in the years since, I’ve been trying to wonder who called it Arnold Palmer versus who called it half and half.

What kind of like the linguistic spread of that is.

I thought it might have to do with race, the black thing.

Some of my family’s black and they call it half and half or maybe even class or even just like regional dialect.

But of all the questions I’ve asked all my friends around the country, there’s just so much variation in what they call it.

So I was wondering if you guys can provide any sort of insight on what the origin of the phrase is and what the spread of it is.

Okay. So I think we can help here a little bit, Martha, can’t we?

Yeah. I’m actually surprised that this was Maryland because I know in Baltimore in particular,

Half and half is a really popular drink.

And it usually refers to what we call an Arnold Palmer.

You have that with a chicken box.

Yeah. I grew up south of Baltimore in a suburb.

Okay.

Where everyone there called it half and half too, to my knowledge.

All my friends called it half and half.

I’m not aware of a particular distribution of half and half referring to what we think of as an Arnold Palmer,

The half lemonade and half sweet tea.

It’s kind of here and there all over the country, wouldn’t you say, Grant?

Yeah, my understanding was, though, that that’s what Arnold Palmer called it himself first

When he started drinking this concoction in the 1960s.

Right. And he kept going in and ordering these and pretty soon they just got associated with, you know, it’s like Arnold Palmer going in and asking for the usual.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s, but I’m really interested in the mix of teas.

You can find some mentions of that.

But again, it’s like I was saying, I joked about it, but it’s for those people who just can’t stomach all that sugar in the Southern sweet teas and just need it.

It’s a way of getting your sweet tea a little less sweet because it’s made already sweetened and there’s no way to get it unsweetened.

If you ask for unsweetened tea, people say, well, we don’t have that.

So usually they’ll add a water or something else.

I don’t know.

And more often I’ve heard half and half referred to in the context of alcoholic beverages like a Guinness and Harp, you know,

Because the Guinness will lie there nicely on top of the lighter ale.

Yeah, like a stout and an ale together, right?

I’ve never heard of it in the alcoholic context.

Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah, that goes back to, gosh, at least the 1750s.

But yeah, you’ve found an interesting instance of that.

I was wondering, did you guys grow up drinking this?

And what did you guys call it growing up?

No, I didn’t grow up drinking it in Kentucky.

I had it maybe once as a young adult, and I thought it was so exotic.

No, we drank sweet tea after the Southern tradition in my father’s house,

And if you put lemonade in it, I’m sure he’d have thrown you out.

Yeah, you’d been in the yard with all your belongings real fast.

But I agree with Martha.

There doesn’t seem to be any regionality to it.

I think it’s just what you learned when you grew up.

It was probably called half and half originally, although Arnold Palmer didn’t invent the drink.

It existed before him.

There are records from the 40s and the 50s and menus and newspapers of similar drinks.

And there are many other drinks since that have been mixtures of tea and lemonade and other things.

Yeah, there are other names like Sunshine Tea.

And then, of course, there are the spiked versions of the Arnold Palmers.

Like the Tipsy Palmer.

Yeah.

Yeah, or the John Daly, named for another golfer who liked to drink.

He’s with vodka.

This might merit more research.

Foodways are kind of a sideline of ours because they map so well with wordways, so to speak.

When you look at the habits of eating and the habits of speaking, they’re kind of braided together like a long rope.

So maybe we need to look more into this, Martha.

What do you call the tea and lemonade mixture in your house?

What did you grow up with or what do you call it in a professional capacity?

Let us know.

And Drew, thank you for your call and thanks for bringing this up.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Drew.

Bye-bye.

Bye.