F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates “to Cocktail,” the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928)

I reg­u­lar­ly meet up with speak­ing part­ners who help me learn their lan­guages in exchange for my help­ing them learn Eng­lish. Even though they usu­al­ly speak much bet­ter Eng­lish already than I speak Kore­an, Span­ish, Japan­ese, or what have you, I often feel like I’ve got the heav­ier end of the job. Why? Because the Eng­lish lan­guage, for all its advan­tages — its glob­al reach, the ease with which it incor­po­rates for­eign terms and neol­o­gisms, its wealth of descrip­tive pos­si­bil­i­ty — has the major dis­ad­van­tage of sel­dom mak­ing imme­di­ate sense.

From Eng­lish’s great flex­i­bil­i­ty flows great frus­tra­tion: how many times have for­eign friends put up a piece of text to me — often from respect­ed, canon­i­cal works of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture — and demand­ed an expla­na­tion? They’ve usu­al­ly stum­bled over some obscure usage that qual­i­fies as at least unortho­dox and per­haps down­right ungram­mat­i­cal, but nonethe­less intu­itive­ly under­stand­able — if only to a native speak­er like me. Here we have one exam­ple of just such a lin­guis­tic inven­tion refined by no less a respect­ed, canon­i­cal writer than F. Scott Fitzger­ald: the verb “to cock­tail.”

“As ‘cock­tail,’ so I gath­er, has become a verb, it ought to be con­ju­gat­ed at least once,” wrote the author of The Great Gats­by in a 1928 let­ter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of pub­lish­er Alfred A. Knopf. Who bet­ter to first lay out its full con­ju­ga­tion than the man who, as the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter puts it, “gave the Jazz Age its name”? Giv­en that his fame “was for many years based less on his work than his personality—the soci­ety play­boy, the speakeasy alco­holic whose career had end­ed in ‘crack-up,’ the bril­liant young writer whose ear­ly lit­er­ary suc­cess seemed to make his life some­thing of a roman­tic idyll,” he found him­self well placed to offer the lan­guage a new “taste of Roar­ing Twen­ties excess.”

And so Fitzger­ald breaks it down:

Present: I cock­tail, thou cock­tail, we cock­tail, you cock­tail, they cock­tail.

Imper­fect: I was cock­tail­ing.

Per­fect or past def­i­nite: I cock­tailed.

Past per­fect: I have cock­tailed.

Con­di­tion­al: I might have cock­tailed.

Plu­per­fect: I had cock­tailed.

Sub­junc­tive: I would have cock­tailed.

Vol­un­tary sub­junc­tive: I should have cock­tailed.

Preter­it: I did cock­tail.

If you, too, decide to teach this advanced verb to your Eng­lish-learn­ing friends, why not sup­ple­ment the les­son with the audio clip just above, a read­ing of the let­ter from the Ran­som Cen­ter? Lan­guage-learn­ing, no mat­ter the lan­guage, inevitably gets to be a grind from time to time, but vary­ing the types of instruc­tion­al media can help alle­vi­ate the inevitable headaches. And when the day’s stud­ies end, of course, an actu­al cock­tail­ing ses­sion could­n’t hurt. After all, they always say you speak a for­eign lan­guage bet­ter after a drink or two.

via the great Lists of Note book

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Drink­ing with William Faulkn­er: The Writer Had a Taste for The Mint Julep & Hot Tod­dy

Film­mak­er Luis Buñuel Shows How to Make the Per­fect Dry Mar­ti­ni

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 13 Pre­pos­ter­ous Ideas for Your Left­over Turkey

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.