I have often wondered about the naming of medicines. There seem to be trends ranging from the specifically descriptive to the totally ambiguous. Remember such forthright names as Carter’s Little Liver Pills, VapoRub®, Allerest®, Sinex™? Their names gave us a pretty good idea of what they were intended to treat. Today, we have not a clue as to what ailments might be treated by things called Linzess®, Ingrezza®, Austedo®, Meibo™ or such unpronounceable things as hydrochlorothiazide. Who names these things, anyway? I assume it is the labs that develop or manufacture them, but why be so vague and mysterious?

I tend to suspect that the names include some of the active ingredients which we unscientific commoners wouldn’t recognize anyway, but I’ve tried to check out that theory and, so far, have found no evidence that several remedies intended to treat the same maladies share any common elements of their names. What, for example, do Prilosec®, Pepto-Bismal®, Maalox® and Tums® share in their names even though they are all remedies for heartburn? (I think “Wonderbelly” is a perfect name for an antacid – just think of the different meanings of the words “wonder” and “belly” – the name covers all possibilities even if the product doesn’t.)

If we can rely on evidence in old movies, a lot of medicines used to be called “elixirs” or “tonics” and often included significant amounts of alcohol, laudanum or other narcotics. Laudanum, by the way, is a highly addictive tincture of opium dissolved in alcohol and, for centuries, was prescribed as a remedy for just about any kind of pain, much as we have more recently used aspirin.

Today’s ever-present soft drinks evolved from the 17th-century lemon juice and honey beverages first served in Paris. When Dr. Joseph Priestly introduced carbonated water, the drink was sold in pharmacies for its health benefits. During the eighteen-hundreds, sodas were still considered medicinal and, to make them more palatable, pharmacists added flavorings that resulted in root beer, Dr. Pepper® and Coca-Cola®. It wasn’t until the crown cap (that crimped pop-bottle cap we have known all our lives) was invented in 1892, that carbonated soft drinks could be satisfactorily bottled for wider distribution and a flurry of assorted new flavors appeared. The term “soft drink” became commonly understood to refer to drinks that did not contain alcohol as in “hard liquor.” In 1903, Coca-Cola® removed cocaine from its recipe, which was partly responsible for the “Coca” in its name, being extracted from coca leaves. The “Cola” comes from the Kola nut which adds the stimulant caffeine to the formula.

My dad was an auto dealer, and business was bleak during WWII when new cars and replacement parts were scarce to non-existent. For a time, Dad ran a small bottling plant in Indianola called Dorsey Beverages where he bottled many different flavors of soft drinks until he sold the plant before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. The new owner did not want to buy all the inventory, so Dad brought home many powdered flavorings, similar to Kool-Aid®, a truckload of bottled strawberry pop and a big box of gold-colored, blank bottle caps that we played with for years afterward.

The shiny bottle caps gleamed like gold coins, inspiring fantasy games involving pirates and treasure chests, or prospectors discovering untold riches in remote caves and river beds. There were enough of the glittering disks to build impressive golden castles or pave yellow-brick roads or garden paths for princesses. We were, after all, children of the Great Depression and well versed in inventing our own toys and games. My sisters and I loved playing with the bottle caps which were stored, along with several sets of dominoes, in an old picnic basket. While we never learned to play proper games of dominoes, we found them, along with the bottle caps, quite useful in learning arithmetic as well as teaching the younger siblings to count. It’s really fun to count your gold and feel immensely rich.