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Night pleasures6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() “To be coiffé in this sense was to have so much drink in the head as to be sleepy, i.e. “ Coiffer in French means to dress the hair, also to put on a head-dress or a nightcap,” Mackay wrote. In the 1877 book The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe, the author Charles Mackay suggests that it was the nightcap that brought us another enduring term in the drinking lexicon: “quaff”-to drink heartily. While modern science insists that alcoholic beverages are not as useful a sleep aid as previously thought, the nightcap was such a vital fixture to 19th-century Western drinking culture that its metaphorical meaning was presumed to be universal. The earliest written usage of “nightcap” is likely traced back to the aforementioned Oxford Night Caps in 1827, though considering that an entire recipe book was published based on the concept, the “nightcap” likely began its journey into the English lexicon much earlier. It’s so much about your personal state of mind at that moment.” “It has to be what makes you happy at the end of the day. ![]() “The nightcap is an intensely personal beverage,” bartender Natasha David, who owned the late bar Nitecap in New York, told Punch contributor Kara Newman in the book titled. ![]()
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