Seen yesterday on the side of a very large delivery lorry.

VODKA ICE! New "diet" flavour.

Chicken.

Bob: Forgive the incredible ignorance of an old curmudgeon, but what's vodka ice

I don't know what Vodka ice is, either, Dale.

The sign on a very large lorry,
(Was it a Whig? Or a Tory??)
"Contains Vodka Ice!!"
How Russian! How nice!!
And that is the ... rest ... of the story.

Well, I've never heard of vodka ice before. One can imagine freezing vodka in cubes and using it in drinks with regular ice, so that as the ice melts, the vodka does as well, preventing the drink from being watered down. This doesn't really make any sense, since vodka is typically around 80 proof, and has a freezing point much lower than that of water, as evidenced by vodka not freezing in a freezer. I suppose one could dilute the vodka to the point where it would freeze, but I would assume dilution would remove much of the effect. Any chemists around who care to tell me how much what alcohol by volume you would need to get it to freeze in a standard freezer?

It's the brand name of one of those chilled alcopop drinks designed to appeal to teenagers who want their alcohol to taste like pop.
Sorry I'd momentarilly forgotten that it might be marketed under another name over there.
Actually, considering your drinking age laws it's possible that they may not be on sale at all over there. They are drinks with a very high alcohol content (close to that of neat spirits) that look smell and taste like fizzy soft drinks. They are marketed in bottles that hold about a third of a litre so that people drinking them can drink a lot because of the sweetness but in doing so consume much more alcohol than people drinking spirits (which they drink slower) or beer (which has lower alcohol). For most adults they are too sweet to be really pallatable and so are consumed mainly by younger drinkers.

My puzzlement was over whether "diet" can be used as a description of a flavour.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

I don't think such products are available around here, although we have Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice, which may refer to the same drink or type of drink. There are a number of colorful terms for adult men who drink such things, many of them slang for the female anatomy.

No, diet can not be used to describe a flavor.

Bob: I had the same reaction as Sean, but thank you for filling us in

Also I like the neologism "alcopop"

dale, the very fact that you consider it a neologism tells me all I need to know. In the UK both the word and the vile concoctions to which it refers have been around for a few years now and the term is in common everyday use. You wouldn't find anyone here who didn't know it.

There is clearly something to be said for your less liberal drinking laws after all.

Bab: Well to me it's a neologism. I've observed it's very difficult to pinpoint the age of an expression unless you subscribe to several expensive services. One of the techniques I use is to enter it in OneLook

A small number of hits (only 9 for "alcopop") suggests it's neologic

If there's such a word

Alcopop gets 159K ghits, and some of them have nice explanitory text associated with the word. As a budding lexicographer, you might think about expanding your source material and references.

I do think we have talked about alcopops here before being a British concoction. For once, the English have something bad that we don't have! On the other hand, we probably have it under some other name. Sean, as one of our younger members, do we have any drinks like that?

The other day my daughter saw this sign for "Vodka or Gin in Fresh Lemonade" and asked me to buy her one. Well I got all mixed up when ordering and asked for a Vodka and Gin. Needless to say, the waitress gave me quite a strange look and said, "We generally don't do that."

I've never heard of them, but here's what the OED Online says:

alcopop, n.
Brit.

A sweet or fruit-flavoured (and freq. carbonated) drink containing alcohol; (also) a bottled, ready-mixed spirit and mixer.

1996 Daily Tel. 9 Jan. 7/2 (caption) ‘Alcopop’ sales fizz as young Britain gets the taste. 1996 Independent 30 Jan. 2/8 The launch of two new alcoholic fruit drinks looks set to brew up another storm over criticism that the ‘alcopops’ encourage under-age drinking. 2000 Herald (Glasgow) (Electronic ed.) 26 Aug., As long as young drinkers simply want a vodka and cola or a Smirnoff Icea huge seller as it is the first alcopop bought by both sexes.

Notice that the word was enclosed in single quotes in the 1996 quotations, but not in the 2000 quote.

I've never heard of "malternative drinks" before, either, but that's what Wikipedia says they are most commonly called in the U.S.

Tinman

Wikipedia is wrong. I've never heard anyone call it that. The most ubiquitous term I've heard is "witch beer", or less common, since the word is more offensive, "wussy beer", and change the w's to the proper letter. Wikipedia's "most commonly" is misleading.

Malternative :- 31.2 k ghits
"witch beer" :- 348 ghits
"wussy beer" :- 47 ghits
"pussy beer" :- 11.6 K ghits

alcopop.

At one time - probably 10 years ago - there was so much concern about alcopops that the Government was sabre-rattling about controlling them. Nothing was done and they are now less popular than they were, thank goodness.

As has been said here already, they are alcoholic drinks designed for people who don't like the taste of "proper" drinks.

What is extraordinary to me is, with the plethora of wonderful beers, wines and spirits we have in this country, that people can't find a "proper" drink that suits them. But that's folks, I suppose.

zm: Thank you for that

Indeed I had Googled the term, but today 159k hits is not very significant, while attempting to learn the age of a term through a tedious search of this sort is simply not feasible

For example, the expression "ginormous" yields 779,000 hits. However, Onelook yields only 10, about the same number as "alcopop," suggesting it may not have gained the kind of currency a dictionary-maker might require for inclusion

Thus I find the OneLook technique often more helpful in this respect. Nonetheless thank you again for your diplomatic suggestion

zmjezhd, I said to "change the w's to the proper letter", attempting not to trigger censorship software, of which I'm not sure this board has.

malternative : 31,600
"bitch beer": 14,700
"pussy beer": 11,400

As you can see, these numbers are pretty close, especially if you combine the latter. Furthermore, google is biased towards non-quoted searches, and those numbers are rounded, so I'm sure there is some error which is difficult to quantify.

Dale, using Google like this gives you a pretty good idea of the popularity of certain terms. I'm not suggesting that it replace good old fashioned methods. (Note that asking people on word-oriented boards about neologisms is not even as good as googling, IMHO.) If you want to be a lexicographer, you have to do some pretty "tedious" tasks. Most of what passes for lexicography on the web these days, is merely the copying of lists of hard words from other lists of hard words, often without attribution. Many of the lists having been compiled (i.e., copied) from print dictionaries of hard words, e.g., Mrs Byrne's Dictionary.

Seanahan, sorry I didn't catch the b for w switch on the witch beer. I used quote searches to exclude the pages that merely contained the words somewhere and not as a collocution. Malternative still gets more than the other two terms put together.

You're quite right about that; tedious all right

However, there at least ought to be some source, online, that would essily yield the age of a term

One of my criteria (purely arbitrary) is my 1973 Merriam Webster Collegiate. If I can't find it there or in my 1995 H-C Dict of Am. Slang I call it a neologism or assume for some reason it's not yet widespread

We have those drinks over here, folks! You just haven't noticed, Kalleh, because you drink excellent beer in excellent beer joints. Go to one of those drive through beverage stores, and you can find Vodka Ice . . . Smirnoff Ice . . . I have some kind of thing by Bacardi in my fridge now, embarrassingly enough, because I was pulled in by the brand name and the pretty advertising sign. I was also feeling weak and thirsty. The stuff is worse than kool-aid, and I'm tempted to just chuck the whole thing out. I'm going to try it as a bbq sauce first, though, just to see how it caramelizes while grilling. It's watermelon flavor. What possessed me to buy it?!?!?

Piffle - I like some alcopops because I really can't abide the bitter taste and aftertaste of so many alcoholic drinks, and although I seldom drink alcohol, when I do I'm not going to drink something that makes me gag just to satisfy the drink snobs now, am I?

Bob, what do you mean their alcoholic content is 'close to that of neat spirits'? Checking the bottles of WKD Blue left over from my Eurovision night, the alcohol is 5%, much less than the bottle of White Zinfandel in my fridge (the only wine I can actually enjoy, and even then I only like one brand and I really have to be in the mood for even that). Of course, that's still higher than most beers, which is why it makes me laugh when men who drink them are called wimps, since they're imbibing a stronger drink than your average lager lout. Still, machismo doesn't exactly run on logic.

Yes that was an error. I meant to go back and edit it out. I forgot.

But to return to the OT, does anyone else have a view on the novel use of the phrase "diet flavour"?

Bob: Seven thousand hits but few if any defs. I'd like to know, too

Lexicpgraphy lesson 1A: Find a new word or term and can't find it in a dictionary, online or off? Here's what you do. Find as many uses in texts, online and off, and try to determine the meaning from context. Don't try to replace this time-tested methodology with a short-cut, such as asking folks online or off what they think it means. They may not share your enthusiasm for neologism, real and alleged, and annoyed people do strange things, like posting about themselves in the third person or by going postal (q.v)..

Just as well I'm not intending to set myself up as a lexicographer, then. My view? SOme idiot of an advertiser doesn't understand that "flavour" and "variety" are not the same thing.

(Though I suppose you could argue for flavour taking on this new meaning given phrases like "He's flavour of the month.")

flavo(u)r

It's interesting, etymologically, that flavor and flatus come from the same Latin verb flo 'to blow' from the same PIE root *bhlē- 'blow' that gives us bladder and blow.

zm: You're absolutely right about the tedious search, although from time to time I do get a successful hit from one our sister boards

Thank you for allowing that I have at least achieved the stage of budding

There is one such board where I have had signal success but according to protocol I cannot name it here

But I am dalehileman@verizon.net and always open for a chat

Sean, thank you for those synonyms

My rule of thumb is anything over 20,000 hits might be considered dictionary material; so "malternative" qualifies

Also I like the word

Does "diet flavor" mean artifically sweetened

I genuinely believe it's nothing more than a confusion in the ad-men's minds of the terms flavour and variety.

We sell ten flavours - or varieties - so adding another, which may be lower calorie than the others but identical in taste - makes eleven varieties - or flavours.

I think it's that simple. The people creating the ad didn't stop to think that they were writing gibberish.

It just struck me as amusing. Almost as amusing as the fact that ninety nine out of a hundred would probably not notice the anomly, much less comment on it.

Interesting.

Yes it is, Bob; thank you

So, I've been pronouncing it as mall-ternative, but it seems people would say malt-ernative. The former loses the play on words, and the latter has a pause before "ernative", which sounds funny. Does anyone else have this problem?

Sean, I haven't heard anyone pronounce it, so I can't say. I would think it is pronounced, "mall-ternative."

Bob, I thought, like you, that it was just the ignorance of the advertizers. However, judging from Zmj's last link on "diet flavour," I am now wondering if indeed it was meant to be; that is, perhaps they consider it to be the flavor of a sugar substitute. That of course is absoludicrous, but that's beside the point.

[I have been just waiting to use that word "absoludicrous! ]

quote:

Originally posted by zmjezhd:
flavo(u)r

It's interesting, etymologically, that flavor and flatus come from the same Latin verb flo 'to blow' from the same PIE root *bhlē- 'blow' that gives us bladder and blow.

If so, then here's an unsavoury related word: flatulence.

Phroggye

quote:

I would think it is pronounced, "mall-ternative."

But that misses the whole "malt liquor" part. To me, mall-ternative is an alternative mall, and malt-ernative is an ernative malt. I'm trying to write a "malt-ergative" joke, but obviously the linguistic neurons aren't firing too well this morning.

I thought it was mal-ternative, as in malwear, i.e., "bad" instead of "other".

I thought it meant a different shopping centre.

I like absoludicrous, Kalleh .

Bob, this reminds me of when I was a young child and had some of a friend's bubblegum (I wasn't allowed it, lol). It said 'original flavour' on the packet, and I thought for ages that there was a real flavour called 'original'.

I think you're right about the 'diet' and 'variety' thing too.

quote:

Originally posted by Cat:
I like absoludicrous, Kalleh .

Bob, this reminds me of when I was a young child and had some of a friend's bubblegum (I wasn't allowed it, lol). It said 'original flavour' on the packet, and I thought for ages that there was a real flavour called 'original'.

I think you're right about the 'diet' and 'variety' thing too.

And that in turn reminds me of something from my childhood. I always wondered why it said "dilute to taste" on a bottle of orange squash when you could taste it perfectly well without diluting it.

quote:

I was a young child and had some of a friend's bubblegum

How long had your friend chewed it for?

quote:

orange squash

Is that an orange drink, I gather?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:

quote:

orange squash

Is that an orange drink, I gather?

It's just the generic term for a fruit drink that needs to have water added to it to dilute it before drinking. I don't know what the American word would be.

I thought you could refer to the diluted drink as (orange) squash also? In California, we call them Italian sodas, mainly because they're made from Torani syrups.

quote:

I thought you could refer to the diluted drink as (orange) squash also?

Yes, quite right. The concentrated orange juice (plus [usually] umpteen dubious additives) as sold in the bottle is referred to as orange squash, and so is the diluted drink in the glass.

quote:

Originally posted by arnie:
How long had your friend chewed it for?

Ew! It was a fresh piece, thank you very much . My brother and I were never allowed bubblegum apart from very occasionally, such as when a friend offered us some (and even then we couldn't have it for very long). It was a nuisance for a while as a child, but I grew up not only without the taste for the stuff, but also with no fillings, as opposed to my gum-chewing friends .

Ah but if you had let your friend chew it first all the sugar would have been gone and you could have enjoyed (!) it without worrying about your teeth.