shewhomust | Too far north (Reply)

Yet the nineteenth-century expansion of the world that was known of and reckoned with did bring in a couple of trophies. 'Ask where's the North?' Pope had written. 'At York, 'tis on the Tweed;/In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there/At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where...' North in eighteenth-century slang meant clever; it drew on stereotypes of canny Yorkshiremen and cunning Scots. Too far north meant too clever by half. By the second half of the 1800s, at the very least, almost everybody knew where a north was in terms larger than the compass of the British Isles, leaping straight from York to the ice; that north was a place where the Navy went. The new slang sense of north from the 1860s on, meaning strong, where drinks were concerned, came from the Navy. Grog that was due north was absolutely neat, no water in it at all. Too far north - desperately, incapably drunk - now carried the sense of being hopelessly lost up there in the ultima Thule of booze. Elaborated into a jovial saloon-bar or shipboard witticism, it even brought together the degrees proof of spirits with the degrees of north latitude. Another point north, Steward: mix that a bit stronger, won't you?

From Francis Spufford's I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, which I am very much enjoying.