Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/497

who were probably too much concerned with the contents of the bottle to pay attention to the inscription on the label anyway.

Beer being one of the unmentionables at present, I regret that I shall have to serve my readers with one of the many “near-beers” that have made their appearance since the obsequies. I have been somewhat partial, personally, to Bevo. This, because of the resemblance of its name to that of the real thing, ought to prove popular with American Czechs. I have always felt that the trade name is an adaptation or an imitation of the word pivo. A Pullman washroom acquaintance to whom I expressed this belief was inclined to think that Bevo was derived rather from the Latin bibo (I drink,) and I was just about to inform him that, after all, the Bohemian noun and the Latin verb were cognates, when one of those ubiquitous know-it-alls stopped the operation of brushing his teeth long enough to make a triangular debate of the discussion with: “Aw, gwan! Yer both off! Bevo was named after a girl Mr. Anheuser Busch met over in Austria.” Party No. 2 waxed sarcastic, as well as eloquent, in explaining that “Mr. Anheuser Busch was as mythical as “Messrs. Montgomery and Ward” and that the cognomen Bevo was a moral impossibility excepting among American ladies of color, but I was obliged to side in with Party No. 3 to the extent of saying that I had read something to that effect in a St. Louis paper a few years ago. Of course it wasn’t “Mr. Anheuser Busch,” and I forget the details of the article, which, at the time, I was disposed to classify as the sensational ebullition of some romance-hunting scribe; but, since I began work on this essay, it occurred to me that I might as well get first hand information on the subject. My curiosity has just been satisfied by Anheuser-Busch, Inc., and Party No. 3 owes me a dollar.

Mr. P. Morton Shand, in his recently published “Book of Food,” ^[1] mentions Slivovitz as a plum brandy hailing from Yugo-Slavia. The word is a Germanized spelling: among Czechs plum brandy is very popular, and is called slivovice (slíva = a plum) or slivovka.

Mr. Thomas Čapek, in a brief chapter devoted to language matters in his “Čechs in America,” ^[2] takes note of the names bestowed upon Bohemians by gamin America. The nicknames mentioned are: Bohoes, Bohunks, Cheskey