One of my coworkers insists that she and her friends call a 1.75 liter bottle of hard liquor a donkey. She claims that she's been doing this for more than 20 years, but she doesn't have an explanation, and none of the other Minnesotans in the office has ever heard this usage.

(I say either one-point-seven-five or handle — yes, yes, even when there's no handle. Some people apparently say jug.)

Does anyone else say donkey? The Double-Tongued Word Wrestler came up blank, and all I learned from the Urban Dictionary was how disgusting the Internet is. However, after much too much googling, I found a single (apparent) corroboration on a message board:

but remember, no party is the same without me. NEVAR!~~

new years party, Im bringing a donkey bottle of cuervo. [cite]

The other commenters seem to be from the Houston area, which only deepens the mystery.

I had more luck with pony, which my mom used this past weekend to describe those stubby little bottles of beer. (Not to be confused with pony keg, which was my initial interpretation. Now that would have been a much more interesting story.)

Foodgoat has a great roundup of the many alcohol-related meanings of pony.

This sense of the term apparently comes from the old 7 oz. Rolling Rock bottles, which had a picture of a pony on the label:



There are many imitators, and as far as I can tell no brewery, Rolling Rock included, is too keen to take the credit for inventing the pony bottle.

Incidentally, Rolling Rock is also somewhat famous for printing a mysterious 33 on the bottles. I'm reminded of the similarly mysterious journalistic 30.

Labels: dialect, vocab