On any winter night, in any Canadian city, beer-soaked, toque-clad young men slump on sticky kitchen floors, flipping bottle caps in an attempt to strike a target worthy of their skill: perhaps the top of an empty bottle or the nose of an unconscious peer. This sport is called caps and it parallels, if not descends from, a game played thousands of years ago by young Greek men after they finished dining. Called kottabos, a name that derived from a Greek word meaning cup and then entered Latin as cottabus, the game demanded that each young Greek fling the dregs of his wine into a metal vessel placed some feet away. As he did so, he shouted the name of his mistress and if the wine made the vessel ring, it was a sign that she loved him. The word cottabus first appeared in English in the early nineteenth century.