From today’s Publisher’s Lunch:
As has been expected, Carol Ann Duffy was named the UK’s poet laureate, the first woman to hold the position in 341 years. Along with a small stipend, the honor comes with a “butt of sack” — 600 bottles of sherry to stoke the muse — which the Guardian says she asked for upfront after hearing the previous laureate Andrew Motion never received his due.
Thank goodness for British English, which gives us these treasures of language from time to time. A butt of sack is a wooden cask for storing wine and will hold about 126 gallons of such beverage. Shakespeare uses the term in The Tempest, wherein the shipwrecked Stephano explains his means of survival:
I escaped upon a butt of sack, which the sailors heaved overboard…(Act II, Scene II)
I think I may have a butt of sack of my own in out in the living room. It’s a wooden box with Portuguese wine branding, nailed shut, big enough for about 8 bottles. I keep my plants on it.
And that closes out today’s butt of sack post. Unless the 7-year-old boy in me wants to say “butt of sack” once more….why yes, he does. Butt of sack. I think it’s my new funniest word, supplanting “crapbag.”