The Verb "To Beer": A Comparative Study

So I came home from some errands to hear that my wife was on the phone with her elderly mother and her caregiver back in Romania, a Saturday ritual.

I hear only one side of the conversation: 

"Bere? Bravo! Va Berim!"

Eu si prietenul meu Virgil ne berim!

I'm working really hard on my Romanian, as well as studying the Romanian Constitution in preparation to take their citizenship test. So I understand the exchange, even though it included something I had never heard before: 

"Beer? Bravo! You're drinking Beer together!"

My wife had used a verb I had never encountered, "a se beri," "to drink beer with someone."

I asked her if that's really even a verb or whether she had just coined it. She thought it was something she had heard. A quick internet search showed that this reflexive verb really is a thing, evidenced by another Romanian tweeting "We drink beer together tonight, yes?"

"A se beri" is a reflexive, on the pattern of  "a se întâlni," "to meet with someone."

In English we also have the verb "to beer," but it means "to give a beer." You can walk into a bar or a party and say, "Beer me!" and native speakers understand that means, "Quick! Give me a beer so I can get my buzz on like the rest of you!"

And this verb in English is by no means a modern coinage. It is attested as early as 1870:

No doubt he then can feed us, wine us, beer us,
And cook us something that can warm and cheer us.

(Daryl Sidney, "His First Brief. A Comedietta" in Drawing-Room Plays and Parlour Pantomimes compiled by Clement Scott [Robson and Sons], pp. 303-304.) 

Here is what may be the world's largest beer can, at the Tuborg Plant in Pantelimon, directly across the street from the cemetery where my late father-in-law is buried. There are Romanians who won't drink Tuborg because they worry that the bodies of those dead somehow contaminate the water of that region. Personally, I drink Tuborg and enjoy it.

Despite the ability to say "to wine and dine" in English, the parallel construction does not exist in Romanian. You cannot say, "Ne vinim!" "Let's drink wine together!"

Or maybe I can successfully coin it?  

Made in Wisconsin

I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I only left there in 2002 to go to work for the Top Secret National Security Agency

Uncle Josh's Bait! Click to Visit their Website

after 9/11. 

As I was setting out this morning on a fishing expedition, my neighbor gave me a vial of bait he had purchased but hadn't yet used. To my initial surprise, it was produced, mirabile dictu, in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. 

As the initial surprise wore off, however, I settled into the realization that a Wisconsin fishing product showing up in New Jersey made perfect sense. Let's face it, everywhere in this country, people look upon Wisconsin as a pristine and pure place where the cheese is infinitely better, the trees must grow taller, the fishing, certainly, but even the beer is better.

Organic Valley Sour Cream. Click to visit their Website

I mean, I'm never surprised when I buy organic sour cream here in New Jersey and find it's from Wisconsin.

But this got me to thinking.

"Made in Wisconsin" has a cache about it that many other states must envy.

I mean, there are other states with a claim to fame, to be sure.

Florida Orange Juice! 

Idaho Potatoes!

California Wines!

And "Made in Detroit" might not mean what it once did, but at least people do understand the reference.

But "Made in Wisconsin" somehow impresses people around the US, whether the product be beer, dairy, bait, or who knows what.

And so, inspired by this experience, I'll be making a series of posts on this topic. Wisconsin is truly special place that occupies the imagination of this country dramatically more than its population should have predicted. And there are a lot of stories to tell.

I sadly don't live there currently, but I'll always be from there. And I will never be from anywhere else.

I was "Made in Wisconsin," as well. And I'm so proud of it.

Keith Massey was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He has his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Biblical Hebrew, with a minor in Arabic. After 9/11, he served as an Arabic linguist at the NSA. He is currently a Latin teacher at a public high school in New Jersey.

Keith is the author of Intermediate Arabic for Dummies. His fiction novels follow the adventures of Andrew Valquist, roughly patterned after himself--a man born and raised in Wisconsin who gets pulled into the world of international intrigue. 


Keith's novels are A Place of Brightness, Amor Vincit Omnia: An Andrew Valquist Adventure, Next Stop: Spanish, and In Saecula Saeculorum.

Auf Deutsch!

Written at Munich Airport while in transit to Romania:

I'm tired as I write this. Munich thinks it’s 11 AM, but my body knows better. A flight on Lufthansa (there’s no other way to travel) has just shot me six hours into the future.

What do you do in at the airport in Munich while you await your connection to Romania? Well, you have a beer, of course! I mean, you’re in Germany. They invented beer, didn’t they?

While that seems that it ought to be true, it really isn’t. Beer making probably developed in the Middle East in the Bronze Age and may have even antedated the development of bread.

But for Americans, the German beer making tradition is something we have an inferiority complex over. Most of our own native beer production is openly marketed as being of German origin.

But obviously I digress. And that’s because I’m so tired. Where was I. Oh, I remember the point I was trying to make. It wasn’t about beer, but about the German language. As I’m standing in line to order my beer at Wiener’s Der Kaffee (www.wieners.de), a German ahead of me orders food. And the attendant behind the counter ask, and I understand ever syllable of it, “Und zu trinken?” “And to drink?”

Now, an English speaker should be able to understand that, especially with all the paralinguistic clues flying around. Not to mention the fact that the exchange was composed entirely of cognates. But even so, I had a thrill of pride about being in a foreign country and understanding a bit of the language there.

Now, my background in the German language goes pretty deep into my childhood. As a young boy singing in the choir at the Lutheran church of my nurture, we had sung a piece that contained both Latin and German, Michael Praetorius' Psallite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XTy1Z3PmT8&playnext=1&list=PL82A7E5B3906A99F9

Later, in pre-confirmation catechism classes, I learned the German original to Luther’s famous quote, delivered to the Diet of Worms, “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders” (Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.)

In my particular case, and this would certainly have never been the intent, I believe that the memorization of Latin was not insignificant in my eventual draw to more historical expressions of the Christian tradition, leading to my current constitution within the Orthodox Communion.

But that wasn’t the end of my German studies. I would eventually self-study and pass an exam for my doctoral studies, “German for Graduate Reading Knowledge.” There was a course and everything for this, but I didn’t take it. Instead I studied hard and passed the test all on my own.

At the time I passed that test, I had created a thousand hand written vocabulary cards for German, memorized them German to English and English to German. And then I let it all fade away. Now, in my defense, in the years after passing that test I would go on to learn Arabic well enough to serve at the Top Secret National Security Agency in the capacity of an Arabic linguist.

But even so, I regret that I did not, from time to time, read through those cards and keep my German on some semblance of life support. Maybe it's not too late.