stoughton bottle

qroqqa commented on the word stoughton bottle

From farmhand to physician, men were the frequent object of her colourful scorn, especially the mealymouthed, and the lazy, the dull, and the stupid, what 'sat around like Stoughton bottles' – a cryptic damnation that charmed me as a little boy. I am happy to report that Webster has a few words to say about Dr Stoughton and the bottle that passed into the workaday idiom of the last century. Stoughton, an earlier Dr Munyon or Father John, made and marketed an elixir of wormwood, germander, rhubarb, orange peel, cascarilla, and aloes. It was used to flavour alcoholic beverages and as a strong tonic for winter-weary folk. It came in a bottle that must have been squat, juglike, and heavy. . . . The dictionary merely says, 'To sit, stand, etc., like a Stoughton bottle: to sit, stand, etc., stolidly and dumbly.'

—James Thurber, 1952, 'Daguerreotype of a Lady', in The Thurber Album (Penguin ed., so BrE conventions)

July 10, 2008

Stapler956 commented on the word stoughton bottle

I saw one, my first, last weekend at the 200 year old Blue Hill Farm, Strafford, NH. The young couple who recently bought the farm found the bottle sitting on the front porch!#discuss'>"dumb as a Stoughton bottle," a phrase long forgotten from the colonial era. Stoughton bottles may derive as Thurber writes in qroqqa's post. The bottles were large, earthen, heavy and had a narrow neck; of nominal worth after their original contents (rum, I thought, before reading Thurber) were consumed. Often thereafter used as a doorstop, they were inert obstacles that frequently either caused, or suffered abuse from inattentive passersby.

I saw one, my first, last weekend at the 200 year old Blue Hill Farm, Strafford, NH. The young couple who recently bought the farm found the bottle sitting on the front porch!

August 29, 2017