FROM VERNON TO MOJITO

All July long I have been thinking about a rabbit hole comparable to the one around Slughorn and slogans I did for World Book Day (in April on this very blog). This time we will be discussing Vernon Dursley's connections to Les Misérables, the Norman Conquest, even grog and mojito and the slur "Limey" for any British person...

Uncle Vernon Dursley will be our point of departure. That human walrus and bourgeois party pooper who is irate enough to use a fruitcake from the year before as a hammer. Rowling is no stranger to using place names as surnames... Snape, for instance, though it sounds like "snake" (and like "sever his nape," the full name). Which brings us across the Channel to France and to:

Vernon, France, home of Georges Pontmercy. A provincial village in Normandy, where (in Les Misérables), Col. Pontmercy lived and devoted himself to gardening, after leaving little Marius with his hated in-laws. The place looks pretty idyllic, and I cannot fathom the fact that Georges could not take Marius with him to such a wonderland. 

Now how come Vernon Dursley, and the Malfoys, and the Lestranges have French names (whether first names or surnames) in spite of being British? To answer that, we must turn back time to 1066...

The Norman Conquest left a lot of influence from a new French elite in society, vocabulary... Vernon (the village) is in Normandy, moreover, and the surname Lestrange (at least the Muggle surname) dates back to Elizabethan (Shakespeare) times.

But Mr. Dursley is not the only Vernon to have gone down in history...

Meet Admiral Edward Vernon, active in the eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies. He is famous (or rather infamous) for two things, one of them being his defeat at Cartagena de Indias against Blas de Lezo. The other?

The other was his military uniform, made of gros-grain (Fr. "thick-grain") cloth, which caused his men and officers to nickname him Old Grog. And this gave the nickname of "grog" to the cocktail that men and officers in the Royal Navy usually drank, made of:

1. Fresh water (you can't make a cocktail with ocean water)
2. Rum (the most available distilled drink in the Caribbean)
3. Lime (the most available citrus, as a cure against scurvy)
4. Spices

Due to the lime in the grog they drank, members of the Royal Navy were nicknamed Limeys, which then extended to British people in general. Nowadays, "Limey" is more or less a slur (compare "Frog" or "Kraut").

But this is NOT the end of the story...

Using the same recipe and replacing the spices with fresh mint, what have you got?

A MOJITO! That's right, the Spanish enemies of the Brits put their own spin on the drink!

This is a fascinating rabbit hole... we started at Vernon Dursley and ended up drinking a mojito (via Normandy, the Norman Conquest, and the British Caribbean)!