A little Patricia T. O’Connor can really do a girl some good.

A few weeks ago I wrote the “Word Maven” Patricia T. O’Conner about the etymology of the word “cocktail” and when “incidentally” went out of popular usage. Here is what she wrote back:

“I find no shortage of answers to your question about the etymology of “cocktail,” but I don’t buy any of them. (I’ve read that a footnote in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language lists 40 different etymologies for the term. Unfortunately, I don’t see the footnote in my 1937 edition of the book.)

“The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins says its favorite etymology for the term is that Antoine Peychaud, a New Orleans pharmacist and the creator of  Peychaud’s bitters, popularized the use of ”cocktail” for a mixed drink that he served to customers. Well, Peychaud may have helped helped popularize the term, but it appeared in print well before he opened his pharmacy in the 1930s.   “The first citation for “cocktail” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1803 issue of The Farmer’s Cabinet, an Amherst, N.H., weekly: “Drank a glass of cocktail — excellent for the head … Call’d at the Doct’s … drank another glass of cocktail.”

“Michael Quinion, on his World Wide Words website, lists quite a few questionable “cocktail” etymologies. For example, an innkeeper named Betsy (or Betty) Flannigan supposedly used the tail feathers of a cock as swizzle sticks when serving drinks during the American Revolution. Or the Marquis de Lafayette may have carried an old French recipe for mixed wines, called coquetel, to America in 1777. Here’s a link to Quinion’s entertaining item: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-coc3.htm.

“In summary, I think this is one more case in which we don’t know — and may never know — the parentage of a word.

“As for “incidentally,” it first appeared in print, according to the OED, in the mid-17th century, meaning “in an incidental manner; as an incident, or a subordinate and casual circumstance.”   “The first OED citation for the word used in its modern sense (“in point of fact”) is from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy: ”Incidentally by that time the sex lure or appeal had begun to manifest itself.”   “Incidentally, H. W. Fowler didn’t like the word. In Modern English Usage (1926), he said it was “now very common as a writer’s apology for an irrelevance.”

“Perhaps, but I’m with you. I like the word and use it myself. And I see nothing wrong with a little wholesome irrelevance once in a while.

“Thanks again for writing, and all the best,

Pat O’Conner”