Texas Beer Term Took Long Time to Ferment

Longneck bottle,

Let go of my hand

-- Garth Brooks

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HOUSTON -- The Alamo is remembered, a favorite son is president and now the legacy of Texas, once and for all, is secure: The word “longneck,” as in cold, bottled beer, has been added to the newest edition of the best-selling Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Though San Antonio beer brewers pushed the word into the public lexicon in the early 1970s, and though it was tossed around in bars in one form or another for decades before that, the word has only now been included in the collegiate dictionary. The 11th edition, the first complete revision since 1993, was released in stores this month. It includes, on Page 734, this definition, which holds true to the direct, sparse language of its origins: “Longneck, n., beer served in a bottle that has a long neck.”

“I think it’s about time the rest of the world caught on,” Allen Hwang, director of marketing at San Antonio-based Pabst Brewing Co., said with a laugh.

The word is one of 10,000 new ones that made the latest cut. Since the release of the new dictionary, most lexicographers and etymologists have spent their days tracking trends that, in truth, speak to societal issues that weigh more than 12 ounces.

The emergence of baby boomers, for instance, and their descent into midlife crises and bifocals have led to a host of new additions, such as “comb-over” and “male pattern baldness,” said Tom Pitoniak, an associate editor at the Springfield, Mass.-based Merriam-Webster. Reflecting the rise-and-fall-and-maybe-rise-again saga of the tech industry and the lousy economy, “dot-commer” and “McJob,” the definition of low-wage, dead-end work, made the new edition too.

“These are all words that have become established in the language,” Pitoniak said. “You can make a lot of interesting inferences about culture by looking at the course of its language.”

Around these parts, few of the words are as appreciated as “longneck.”

At an online store called UniquelyTexas.com, sales manager Marcos Serrano fancies the longneck so much he has begun selling a product known as “Bottle It” -- a mechanism that fastens a fake longneck bottle top to a can of beer. The product thereby allows the drinker to fantasize that he or she is drinking a longneck, even when one is not available.

“Even when you can imagine not getting that metallic taste, it is etched into the savoring of a beer,” said Serrano, who was born in Galveston, Texas, raised in San Antonio and now works in Boerne, Texas, in the Hill Country.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is the best-selling hard-cover dictionary, and the privately held company has sold more than 55 million copies since the first edition was printed in 1898, said company publicist Arthur Bicknell. The new edition, which is packaged with an electronic version on CD, retails for $25.95.

What is billed as the largest full-time staff of lexicographers in the country -- more than 50 people -- keeps a close eye on language developments, Pitoniak said. Editors wait until a word moves from a “linguistic subgroup,” such as Texans, beer drinkers or fans of country music star Garth Brooks, into “general vocabulary,” he said.

Bar patrons began referring to certain styles of whiskey bottles as “longneckers” back in 1907, Pitoniak said. But the word really caught on after Jerry Retzloff, a representative of Lone Star beer, one of Pabst’s brands, heard it in 1973.

Retzloff was delivering beer to a Dallas-area bar when two women referred to his bottles as “longnecks,” Hwang said. At the time, Lone Star was losing the beer war to canned brands, and Retzloff suggested to company executives that the word could be used to increase Lone Star’s hip factor.

Later that year, the company produced bumper stickers that said “Long Live Longnecks.” They were a hit. Pabst tied the word “longneck” to a comic armadillo beer mascot and the maneuver ultimately helped Lone Star to declare itself “the national beer of Texas,” a modest title it still claims today.

“There were other brands using longneck bottles, but we were the first to use it in marketing communications,” Hwang said. “We used a little Texas funkiness to draw new consumers into the fold.”

While some wonder what took so long, it could have been worse. The Yiddish expression “oy” is among the new inclusions in the dictionary -- though that’s been around in America since the 1890s.

“I’ve just kind of grown up saying ‘longneck,’ ” Serrano said. “I can’t even be objective about it because I’m from right in the middle of it. I guess nobody outside Texas knows what ... we’re talking about. But it never occurred to me that it was called anything else.”