January 17, 2001

moonshine

Can you tell me where the term moonshine, used as a term for illegal liquor, comes from?

Moonlight, meaning 'the light of the moon', is first attested in Chaucer, and moonshine in this sense appeared around 1500. Shakespeare used the words interchangeably: "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank" (Merchant of Venice) and "Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about, Till Candles, and Starlight, and Moonshine be out" (Merry Wives of Windsor). And, of course, Moonshine appears as a character in the play within a play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A writer of the Paston Letters in the mid-fifteenth century used moonshine in a different sense: "If Sir Thomas Howys wer ... made byleve and put in hope of the moone shone in the water and I wot nat what." In Love's Labor's Lost, Rosaline says to Ferdinand: "O vain petitioner! beg a greater matter; Thou now request'st but moonshine in the water." Moonshine in the water or, later, simply moonshine means 'something unreal', or, in modern usage, 'nonsense'. In the sixteenth century, to "hang by the moonshine" meant 'to be baseless'.

As an adjective, moonshine originally meant 'moonlit': "It being likewise a moonshine night" (Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 1726). It also had the slightly different sense of 'active by moonlight or at night' and took on a pejorative sense by the nineteenth century. A writer for Sporting Magazine spoke of "moonshine sportsmen, familiarly termed poachers" in 1820.

Although we now think of moonshine as the illegally distilled corn liquor made in parts of the southern U.S., the term originated in England. Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) defines moonshine as follows: "A matter or mouthful of moonshine; a trifle, nothing. The white brandy smuggled on the coasts of Kent and Sussex is called moonshine." The 1796 edition adds "the gin of Yorkshire" to the definition. An 1829 Glossary of North Country Words contains the entry "Moon-light, moon-shine, ...smuggled whiskey." Smugglers operated of necessity at night or by the light of the moon, and the chief object of their smuggling activities came to be called moonshine. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word spread to America and was applied to liquor made illegally to avoid taxes or the prohibitionists.

Moonlight meant 'smuggled liquor' for a brief period in the early nineteenth century, but moonshine and moonlight now have separate meanings. We don't talk of "moonshine and roses." A moonshiner is a smuggler or someone who makes moonshine. In the U.S., a moonlighter is now someone who does paid work, often at night, to earn extra money and is perfectly respectable. In nineteenth-century Britain, a person who was moonlighting was perpetrating some sort of outrage at night, and the term can still have the negative sense (especially in Britain) of working for one company and moonlighting for a rival. The British also speak of a moonlight flit, which is a nighttime departure from one's rooms to avoid paying rent: "Very often we were living somewhere and couldn't pay the rent, so we had to indulge in what was known as a moonlight flit with what furniture and goods were available" (The Listener, 1969).

Georgia