moonshine

more than you would think - a mathematical conjecture

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-moo1.htm

Wow. I feel deprived. No pockets of backwoods moonshiners around here that *I* know of.

I agree, though--great asides for a word I've always liked. :-)

There is a similar "pocket" of individuals, mostly members of a large extended family, around my neighborhood. That they are still making and selling moonshine was made public a year or so ago when it hit the newspapers that students of a local college were caught frequenting the out-of-the-way road to buy gallon jars of homemade liquor. There are still moonshiners out there, it's true.

It's very true. Frighteningly so.

that's the best little aside I've read in a long time, true or not.

Mmm, Mountain Dew.

Side note: There is a tiny, tiny little village in the heart of Florida's Ocala National Forest, called Scrambletown. You won't find it on any map. Scrambletown is a general store, junkyard, honey farm, and fundamentalist Baptist church, surrounded by mobile homes. The population, surely in the low triple-digits, consists mainly of two largish redneck families.

My family stumbled into Scrambletown in 2001. We were considered outcasts, city folk, and (to make matters worse) my mom wouldn't wear long dresses and my dad wouldn't join the local militia. Regardless, I lived there two years before moving away, and my family remained another year before they hit the road as well.

All this to say that Scrambletown's claim to "fame" is that it was a major production center for moonshine during the prohibition. Eventually, the feds came in to raid the place, and everybody scrambled. Hence the name. To this day, Scrambletown remains the nearly-invisible backwoods home of all manner of inbreds, outlaws, and card-carrying members of the KKK. They have withdrawn from society, and society has forgotten them.

Moonshine (sometimes known as Poteen, mooney, hooch, mountain dew, or white lightning) is a common slang term for home-distilled alcohol, especially in places where this production is illegal.

The name is often assumed to be derived from the fact that moonshine producers and smugglers would often work at night (i.e. under the light of the moon) to avoid arrest for producing illegal liquor. The 1811 edition of the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, originally by Francis Grose, defines "moonshine" as follows: "A matter or mouthful of moonshine; a trifle, nothing. The white brandy smuggled on the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and the gin in the north of Yorkshire, are also called moonshine." 1 It has been suggested that the term might derive from smugglers' explaining away their boxes and barrels as "mere moonshine" (that is, nothing). (Jonathon Green, American Dialect Society Mailing List, 31 Oct 2001)

The Armenian name for moonshine is aragh (the word comes from Arabic araq عرق, meaning "sweat" or "juice")