This week, one of my students translated egg nog into French. She ended up with the phrase: lait de poule.
Lait is French for milk, and poule is French for hen. Put the two together and you get, “hen milk”.
Um. This threw me for a loop. I started wondering, “What in the world IS egg nog?
Here is what I found.
Egg-nog: a drink made of milk or cream mixed with beaten eggs and some sort of alcohol, usually rum.
Eggnog shows up in American English around 1775. The word is a combination of egg and nog, a strong beer from Norfolk, England.
From nog, we also get the word noggin. A noggin was originally a small cup or mug. Probably filled with nog. By the time of the Civil War, we Americans had turned noggin into a word for head.
Another word from nog is noggy. Once upon a time, we could describe someone intoxicated as noggy.
So, here’s my advice. Go easy on the hen milk this year. Don’t get too noggy!
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