Talk:Shrub (drink)

Etymology
§Etymology says
 * As used here, the term "shrub" is a metathetic variant of the word "shurb", derived from the Arabic word sharāb meaning "to drink".

The statement cites Collins English Dictionary and Oxford Lexico. Their etymologies (underlining added):
 * Collins: C18: from Arabic
 * Oxford Lexico: Early 18th century from Arabic šurb, šarāb, from šariba ‘to drink’; compare with sherbet and syrup.

Errors in the article's etymology:
 * 1) shurb is not a variant of sharāb, but the other way around: sharāb is a variant of shurb.
 * 2) Therefore, there is no metathesis involved. Metathesis refers to two sounds in a word or sentence trading places, as in the common pronunciation of "ask" as "ax" (="aks"). In the borrowing of sharāb into English, the short "a" in the first syllable was dropped, and the "ā", pronounced about like English "ah", became an "uh" sound as in the already existing word "shrub" meaning "A woody plant which is smaller than a tree and has several main stems arising at or near the ground".

I am correcting the article accordingly.

--Thnidu (talk) 19:56, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Difford's Guide a questionable source
As a cocktail enthusiast, I love a sexy cocktail history, but the story that shrub was created to disguise the flavor of smuggled spirits fouled by storage underwater smells a bit too conveniently sexy. The source, Difford's Guide, is not a historical site but rather a bartending supplies company, and they mention that the author is a bartender, not a historian. Difford's Guide doesn't cite where they got this information. I don't think this meets Wikipedia's source quality guidelines.

Paul Kernfeld (talk) 19:39, 8 March 2023 (UTC)