Booze, the British tot of Rum

The tot of rum to British naval lads was stopped 40 years ago. And the last remaining casks of rum have just been bottled and are available for sale (a mere 600 pounds here).

But for general interest, it's worth reading this.
Background on the term grog and how booze was used in the Navy.

Trivia: naval rum was poured out in 1/2 gill portions. A gill was 1/4 of a pint, or 0.142 ml - except in some districts where it's a half-pint (quarter pint was a 'jack'). As a term, it's interchangeable with 'noggin', but only in the south of England, those wacky northerners, and their gratuitous intake, have a noggin as 2 gills.

This actually caused me to do some digging around the OED to see where these words came from. Gill first popped up in 1275, even Johnson used it (each man called for his own half-pint of wine, or gill, if he pleased) in 1773. Interestingly, the Channel Islands apparently had a different measure for a noggin, with pots (half-gallon), quarts, pints, gills (quarter of a pint), and noggins (an eighth of a pint).

The word gill derives from the latin for a wine vessel, as does gallon, possibly.
Noggin may be derived from Knag (a measure of a barrel), but the gaelic and irish (noigean and noigin) are derived from English.

Gill is also used as a familiar or contemptuous term for a woman. Must remember that.

Noggin seems to date to later, OED lists first usage as 1588. The now more common usage of noggin, as head, dates to 1769 (boxing slang), but it doesn't take much to work out how that came about.

Obviously, as in evolution, these all post-date first usage.

Ohhh, Australasian war slang (Korean and Vietnam), noggy - asian soldier.

there you go, education for the day.