I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that water isn’t a beverage. Just that it’s “a beverage” in the same way that a container ship is “a vehicle”. Undeniably, but also special.
Although I am sure this varies from state to state, here in Ohio if you order any soft drink at a drive through like McDonalds you pay state beverage tax. If you order water or milk, you pay no tax. Carry out food is not taxed either.
If you are dining in, everything is taxed.
Dennis
I’m going to guess that the word was not really used much, until for-profit marketing became the universal purveyor of things to drink, and they described their price list as “beverages”. Until designer water bottlers got into the act, water was offered free, so was not on the list of beverages…
Well lets look at the entymology.
There are very few insects found in beverages.
Next, the etymology.
Etymology
From Middle English beverage, from Old French beverage, variant of bevrage, from beivre (“to drink”), variant of boivre (“to drink”), from Latin bibō. Related to imbibe.
So I think that since its french word , it probably means any drink in french,
but in English it was used for the formal… such as a menu, bills, instructions, in the court of the law and royalty. And thats why its something special, other than water.
Note that many continental names for foods duplicated/replaced old english words, due to the 1066 french language invasion…
Beverage doesn’t refer to water because the people who introduced the word into English were intensely classist - “water” (hell, look at that, they never even Frenchified that word) is a drink for the lowest Saxon peasants who can’t even afford small beer. Norman lords probably never drank the stuff if they possibly could avoid it. Why would they apply their word for drink to it?
Hmmm. As I understand it, even the lowest Saxon Peasants didn’t drink water on the grounds that a nice fresh scoop out of the stream, also contained the effluent from the next village upstream. Beer, cider and other alcoholic drinks were easy to make and tasted a lot better.
Beverage clearly applies to any palatable drink, alcoholic or not.
People in the Middle Ages definitely drank water (especially when fasting, which they were supposed to do a lot). But note there are no Norman examples in that cite (but there is a Anglo-Saxon one - I rest my case!)
Definitions vary. The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “a drink of any type”. Other dictionaries just throw in qualifiers like “especially a drink other than water”. A beverage can definitely be water.
So I think the question really is why the Oxford dictionary defines it that way, and it seems to relate to their qualifier “chiefly in commercial use”. Water, IOW, would not be considered a beverage in a commercial context like in a restaurant because it’s typically not a commercial product that they sell. If they sold mineral water or spring water that would qualify as a beverage. A takeout place that has a cooler stocked with soft drinks, iced teas, and bottled water would no doubt consider a bottle of water a beverage when they sold it to you.
Right. If you want a drink without alcohol, that’s a cold drink, not a drink.
I’ll have to tally. I got out fairly often, and I think I am more often asked “can I get you something to drink?” rather than “can I get you a beverage?”. I’m quite certain of it.
The former sounds more inclusive than the latter to me.
I can’t even remember when I last heard a waiter use the word “beverage”. I think the common reference to “a drink” is because “beverage” tends to sound stuffy and antiquated, not to be inclusive. I’m sure the waiter is highly motivated to bring you something he can charge you for, the Oxford dictionary’s commercial connotation for “beverage”.