How to explain the 1990s use of the name "Martini" to refer to a wide range of cocktails (typically containing fruit juices and liqueurs) in no way resembling the traditional gin or vodka Martini?  One way to explain this use is metonymy: "Martini" stands in for another word with which it is closely associated, i.e., "cocktail."  So, for example, "Blue Skyy Martini" (see p. xxi of my book) means "Blue Skyy Cocktail." Compare "the Crown" for monarchy, "No. 10 Downing Street" for the British Prime Minister, "the White House" for the U.S. President.  (These examples are from The Oxford Companion to the English Language, s.v. "METONYMY.")

By a visual metonomy, the Martini glass had long since come to stand for "cocktail" in the ubiquitous tilting neon sign.  (Cf. M,SU, 97-100.)

Another way to explain the use in question would be the related figure of speech, metaphor. "Martini" would then be a comparison, and would say, in effect, "this cocktail is like a Martini," meaning "as good as a Martini," "as strong as a Martini," or the like.  This metaphor becomes attractive once the Martini is established as a symbol.  One can compare the use of "Marathon" (which, by the way, like "Martini" is so common that it is often spelled with a lower-case "m").  "I'd been daydreaming about a television marathon," writes S. K. Gifford.  "I fondly imagined my kids glaze-eyed, slack-jawed . . . anything to buy myself some uninterrupted hours . . . " (N. Y. Times, Aug. 16, 1999, p. A19).  Here "marathon" is a metaphor for a long stretch of time.  It is often so used, though it can also have the additional sense of effort, as in "dance marathon."

Either way, as metonymy or as metaphor, the new, extended use of "Martini" represents somebody's attempt to appropriate the "symbolic capital" that the Martini has acquired over its long life.  ( Now I am somewhat misusing a phrase, "symbolic capital," coined by Pierre Bourdieu [M,SU, 106-107]).  The main purpose of my book was to analyze that "capital," much of which the drink acquired, in fact, through its use by capitalists.  It was no coincidence that, in the 1990s, someone calling himself "the Millionaire" proclaimed a "Cocktail Nation" of young swingers (M,SU, xxi).

© 2001, Lowell Edmunds