Thanks to everyone who visited our National Grammar Day website last week.

One of the fun things you found there was a recipe for a grammar teeny, which as far as

I can tell is just a martini with a fun name.

But when I was putting the recipe on the website, I remembered a question that Dan E. asked

a while ago, do you capitalize the names of cocktails, such as Bloody Mary and Mamosa?

The question turned out to be more complicated than I initially imagined.

Some cocktail names are easy to figure out because they go by the standard capitalization

rules.

If they don't include anything that would be a proper noun, such as a person's name,

or a city name, don't capitalize them.

So Mamosa, mudslide, and pinucalata are all lowercase.

So far so good.

I thought drinks that had a person's name, a country name, or city name would also follow

the standard capitalization rule, their proper nouns, so they'd be capitalized.

But that's not the case, because these names fall into a special category.

They're not literal uses of the proper nouns.

For example, most dictionaries and style guides recommend keeping Manhattan lowercase

when it's the name of a cocktail, because even though the name is derived from the

city name, Manhattan, it's no longer associated with the city.

They also recommend lowercase for Dacquery, even though the cocktail name comes from a city

named Dacquery in Cuba.

But sometimes it's hard to tell whether the drink name is still associated with a person

...