Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth century work, The Faerie Queene, is the longestnarrative poem in English: more than 26,000 lines. In the early 1990s, I studied The Faerie Queene for eight hours a day, five days a week, for three years. By the time I completed my PhD dissertation, I knew every nook and cranny of every stanza in that poem; I had also grown so tired of it that I hated its author for writing it in the first place. Still, there’s no denying that Spenser was a superb poet, adept at depicting allegorical characters with a few vivid lines. The figure of Gluttony, for example, is depicted in The Faerie Queene as having a “belly up-blown with luxury,” as having “spewed up his gorge” from overeating, and as being more like a “drunken corpse” than a man. Gluttony is also described as holding in his hand a “bouzing can”—in other words, a tin cup full of “booze.” The reference to booze in Spenser’s four-hundred-year-old poem will surprise those who suppose that the word was inspired by E.G. Booz, a nineteenth-century Philadelphia distiller, whose fancy pocket flasks—ornamented with a trademark log cabin—came to be known as “Booz bottles.” The connection between Mr. Booz’s name and his occupation, though, was fortuitous; in actual fact, the word booze dates back in English to the early fourteenth century, where it derived from the Dutch buizen, meaning to drink to excess. In turn, buizen may have evolved from an even older Dutch word, buise, which denoted a large drinking vessel.