Horlicks!

One of the peculiar practices in the Sinha Sadan household in the 90s was that all the 'children', which included middle school going kids like yours truly to my much elder college going cousins, had to have a steaming glass of Horlicks in the evenings before we all sat down to study. Given that Horlicks has always been promoted as bed time drink which induces sleep, this was clearly not a very well researched practice. Effective or not, this was the beginning of my love for Horlicks. Horlicks was also the only malted food which could be had with steaming water instead of milk and given my fashionable childhood distaste for milk, it was but natural that Horlicks was soon my favorite malted food drink.

Horlicks, therefore for me was reminiscent of a time of childhood innocence, Sinha Sadan evenings, my beloved late grandmother and being picked on by my brother and cousins. Therefore, I was amazed to discover, while looking it up last night that it was used as one of the more colorful of profanities. Brits have a way with swear words - Bollocks, Bugger, Bloody! Horlicks for its peculiar parentage and general incongruity stands with the very best of them.

Horlicks, as a malted milk powder was invented in the early 1870s by the Horlicks brothers, James and William. They were Englishmen from Gloucestershire who immigrated to the US settling down in the dairy state of Wisconsin around the same time they came up with the formula for the malted food powder called 'Diastoid'. Soon, the product became extremely popular not just as an easily digestible children drink as it was intended to be but as a soda fountain drink in drugstores and they thankfully dropped the cardiovascular sounding 'Diastoid' for the family name. While the first Horlicks factories were set up in America and in some ways pioneered the malted drink phenomenon, the product attained its real fame and success in Britain and after the Second World War, in India. Not many people are aware that a mountain range in the Antarctica is named after the drink for the nourishment it provided to Richard Byrd's men in the expedition, not to mentioned funding by James Horlicks.

How it became a popular profanity in Britain is not entirely clear. It is believed that it was an upper society fad in the 1980s, given that it appeared in the Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982. It seems likely that it was used in polite societies as a substitute for the more direct 'Bollocks' because of the similarity in the way they sound. Nicholas Sheering wrote in Financial Times that the origin of this expression is 'to make a mess of' for it is very easy to not mix the powder properly and mess up the drink. Whatever the origin might be, the terms was most popular as a swear word in the 1980 and early 1990s, when the company famously tried to use it to their advantage, what seems to be an iconic ad. A housewife has a particularly bad day in which she shuttles from one disaster to the next, settling down with a drink of the malted powder at the end and predictably mouthing Horlicks in a tired, relieved profanity kind of a way.

Jack Straw, the then British Foreign Secretary used the term 'a complete horlicks' in 2003 years after it had gone out of vogue causing reactions from nit just etymologists but also conspiracy theorists who cried foul claiming he had been paid by Glaxo-Smithkline, the new owners of the brand to say so. Considering, in 2004, Glaxo Smithkline hired a PR consultant to help them discourage the slang use of the word, this does not seem likely. Incidentally, if anyone knows where I can find that ad online, please let me know.