hopscotch

Hopscotch, as you can tell by the name, is a kind of whisky made with beer.

You doubt me? It’s made in Vermont by Mad River Distillers. They use “Triple Sunshine” IPA (a kind of beer that has a lot of hops in it) made by Lawson’s Finest Liquids. Now, obviously, as they are in Vermont, it is not truly Scotch; it would have to be made in Scotland for that. But it is a single malt made in the same style.

So we’ve cleared that up.

What?

Children’s game? Are you serious? With hops and Scotch whisky?

I see: in the Oxford English Dictionary they have a quote from 1886 referring to “the well-known boys’ game of ‘hop-scotch’” and another quote from 1801 saying “Among the school-boys in my memory there was a pastime called Hop-Scotch.” So it was boys playing with a bitter plant and…

No?

OK. Scotch that. Apparently it has nothing to do with those kinds of hops or that kind of Scotch. (And lately, at least in North America, it seems to be thought of more as a girls’ game.)

In fact, this word, hopscotch, is a fun little lexical grid game because it is made of two parts, each of which has an unrelated homonym:

Hops, the plant (which can be in the singular, hop, though it seldom is), comes from Proto-Germanic *huppô and has cognates in German Hopfen and French houblon.
Hop, the action, comes from Proto-Germanic *huppōną and has cognates hoppen and hoppa in several Germanic languages (and also hobble in English).
Scotch, the beverage, is formed from Scot plus ish distilled together, and Scot is from Latin Scōtī, which named both the Scottish and the Irish peoples.
Scotch, the noun and verb meaning ‘scratch, cut, score’, referring in this case to the markings on the ground for the game (now often done with chalk or even paint) – and, as in “scotch a rumour,” using the metaphor of scratching out – comes from Anglo-Norman escocher, from Old French coche ‘notch’, apparently from Italian cocca ‘notch, corner’.

So, it stands to reason that there are four options:

	hop ‘bitter plant’	hop ‘leap’
Scotch ‘whisky’	Hopscotch (1)	Hopscotch (2)
scotch ‘scratch’	hopscotch (3)	hopscotch (4)

If hopscotch (4) can be leaping around a scratched court, and Hopscotch (1) can be whisky made from beer featuring bitter herbs, then there should also be a Hopscotch (2) that is leaping around whisky – perhaps a whisky bar (yes, in Saint John, New Brunswick) or a whisky festival (yes, in Vancouver) – as well as a hopscotch (3) that is something made by scratching bitter herbs (well, there’s a whole beer company by that name in Auckland, New Zealand, and there are also I’m not even sure how many beers by that name made by various companies, including one made sometimes across the street from me at Goose Island, though I don’t see any that are of the type of beer called Scotch ale; there is also a hopped cider called Hopscotch made by Saltbox Brewing Company in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia).

And if you want to know about the rules of the game hopscotch, there’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. Look there. I’m just the word dude. Besides, I’ve never played it. When I was a kid in Alberta, it was for girls only. Oh, and if you want to know about the Vermont whisky? Never had that either, but I’ll take the next chance I get.