(BOOT-leg)

Means: Made or sold illegally, especially liquor. These days, also a pirated copy of anything.

Etymology: In the 1800s, smugglers selling whiskey where it was banned hid flat flasks down the leg of a tall boot. By the 1880s bootlegger was American slang for the guy with the flask, and Prohibition made it a household word.

"He swears his uncle's moonshine recipe goes back to a bootlegger who ran whiskey for Capone."

In 1936 Wally Byam rolled out the Airstream Clipper, a reworked version of Hawley Bowlus's Road Chief: a riveted aluminum shell built like an airplane fuselage, rounded so it slipped through the wind. That's Streamline Moderne: teardrop shapes, smooth curves, horizontal lines, and polished metal, the same look as the era's trains, diners, and toasters. Airstream was reportedly the only one of more than 400 trailer makers of 1936 to survive the Depression. When Apollo 11 splashed down in 1969, NASA quarantined Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in a modified Airstream.

By law, bourbon has to be aged in brand-new charred oak containers. A barrel gets one run, then it's done for bourbon. So what happens to all those empties? A lot of them ship overseas: most Scotch whisky is aged in used bourbon barrels, and so is plenty of rum, tequila, and barrel-aged beer. Next time a Scotch guy looks down his nose at your bourbon, tell him his drink was probably aged in a hand-me-down barrel from Kentucky.

The Viagra commercials say to call a doctor if it lasts more than four hours.

At my age, if it lasts four hours, I'm calling everybody I went to high school with.

Each one is a common word or phrase. Name all four.

1. BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER BEER
2. ECNALG
3. SGEG
4. STAND written on top of I

Answers in tomorrow's issue.