Fuzzy Navels and Slippery Nipples: A Sociolinguistic Reading of the Cocktail Menu

This inquiry originates from an incident occurring several years ago when I was in a restaurant that featured an elaborate cocktail menu. Passing the bar, I noticed a waiter arranging a tray of chilled glasses filled with a chocolate liquid capped with a pouf of whipped cream. When I asked the waiter to identify the drink, he responded, "Oh that? It's a Blow Job." I soon realized that I had entered unfamiliar terrain. Raised at a time when a mixed drink signified mature "coolness," I realized that the cocktail menu was a dynamic cultural artifact. Clearly, the more familiar classic drinks that Dean Martin and fellow Rat Packers favored had clearly given way to such mixtures as the Screaming Orgasm, Fuzzy Navel, Slippery Nipple and Slow, Comfortable Screw and, as other examples cited in this inquiry suggest, even more boldly labeled mixtures. For the generation of drinkers accustomed to such traditional cocktails as the Daiquiri, Old Fashioned, or Manhattan, the contemporary, youth-driven shift to the highly sweetened, multi-ingrethent mixed drink is long overdue for cultural interrogation. Contemporary cocktails, like Huckle My Butt, the Screaming Orgasm, or the Purple Hooter coexist with the older classics on the cocktail menu, offering a wide-angle view of evolving beverage preferences as well as shifting cultural values. In approaching the cocktail menu as a cultural artifact, one confronts several questions. What factors have prompted change in traditional drinks and their names? To what extent does the language signifying alcoholic beverages gauge the contemporary sociocultural climate, notably in the overtly sexualized or gendered labeling? What has happened to the traditional cocktails- replete with swizzle sticks, paper umbrellas, bruised mint leaves, and gently risque or exotic names? Do they still exist, but with more assertive identities? Most of all, what has made perusing a cocktail menu an exercise in deep cultural reading? Today's diverse and heavily market-researched cocktail menu fails to yield a clear answer to these questions. As a cultural artifact, the cocktail menu eludes clear-cut interpretation. A vastly expanded range of liquors and mixing beverages, along with the free exchange of recipes on the Internet, has resulted in an explosion of new cocktails as well as revised formulas for standard mixtures. There are literally thousands of drinks, and no doubt more to come as a new generation of theatrical bartenders hurls arcs of blue curacao and cranberry liqueur into their receptacles. Nonetheless, social currents and values are evident in both cocktail names and modes of consumption. With its implicit codes and explicit language, the contemporary cocktail menu offers a lens through which shifts in American mores can be observed. The cocktail menu reflects shifting sexual and leisure-time values and expectations. More specifically, the menu offers more than a list of drink options: rather, it offers fresh perspectives on the interpretation of gender roles in American culture. Theorizing Drinking Clearly, naming cocktails fits into broader contexts, most obviously the human drive to drink alcohol within social structures. Sociologists and anthropologists like Mary Douglas, E. M. Jellinek, and Joseph Gusfield speculate on the cultural symbolism of drinking. From the beginning of time, Jellinek says, drink has had ritual significance, not the least of which is religious. Drinking, he explains, is a custom charged with both positive and negative associations. On the positive side, drink ritualizes lifetime markers, such as death and separation, e.g., a "wake." Or it signals such transitional events as achieving a goal or celebrating membership in a desired or privileged group. Jellinek points out that even illicit teenage drinking signifies transition to adult status or, at the very least, identification with the adult world. Further, the contradictory virtues of "holding one's liquor" affirms the social ideal of self-mastery, even after over-consuming an intoxicant (82). …