Rush the Growler

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Elizabeth calling.

Hello, Elizabeth. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Right on. Circle City. What’s going on?

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was calling because I have been doing some historical research, and in the course of looking at a paper, my eye fell on another article that used an expression that I thought was odd, and it was rushing the can. It was a story about a woman who was behaving drunk and disorderly and kicking garbage cans down the street. At the end of the article, the policeman was joking, I think, in the article that he didn’t know whether he should arrest her for drunk and disorderly behavior or for rushing the can, which was probably in quotes.

So that was my question. I looked around and saw it in a couple of other articles as well.

She was kicking cans down the street?

Well, the story was that she was knocking over garbage cans and rolling them into the river. This was in Kansas City.

Wow.

Really in her cups.

When was this article run?

It was 1897.

Oh, 1897.

Okay.

Okay. And this was a big thing in the late 1880s. It came up in New York City where they had new liquor laws in place, and people discovered the loophole, which was since you weren’t actually allowed to buy alcohol, what you would do is you’d send your kid down to the bar to get it filled, and the kid would bring it back to you so you weren’t actually buying it, and you weren’t actually drinking it in a bar. And the bar technically wasn’t open, and there was a lot of different caveats on this and kind of weirdness, and the kid would bring you back the beer.

And there was like a standard size for a while, and then people realized, well, they could just increase the size of this growler, the vessel, and still pay the same price and get more beer, twice as much or three times as much beer. And apparently this was a source of much drunkenness on Sundays and fights and gang activity and different kinds of mischief got up to. And eventually growlers were banned altogether in New York City because they seemed to contribute to the, you know, you had people not working on Sunday, doing a lot of drinking and running around town causing mischief.

Now, why it’s called rushing, we don’t really know, but presumably you’d send the kid down at top speed.

Yeah. And why the vessel is called the growler, we don’t know either. There’s one newspaper article from 1883 turned up by Barry Poppick, a word researcher, that suggests that it had something to do with the sound of the can. It was made out of metal usually, kind of sliding across the rough surface of a bar top, kind of making as it goes.

Yeah.

But that might be made up that we don’t really know. There’s no real substantiation for that.

Chasing the duck was another term for it.

Chasing the duck.

Chasing the duck. Yeah. Rush the growler, rush the can, chase the can, chase the duck. Lots of different terms for it.

Yeah, I see.

Anyway, I’m not a drinker, so it was just kind of a good thing.

Cool.

Thank you for the call, though.

Okay.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, Elizabeth.

Bye-bye.

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