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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