I didn’t want to write about gin and tonic. It is my favorite drink, I know why, I don’t need to talk about it. Maybe some day I’ll tell you but at the moment I’m afraid that by putting words on it I will no longer enjoy my gin and tonic this much and I love the fact that I’m enjoying it so much.
But then I stumbled onto an interesting fact; the International Gin & Tonic Day, it actually exists, even better: it is celebrated worldwide on the 19th of October. The 19th of October, the day Georg asked the question about the mystery of G&T. Is this coincidence? Was there something in the air or did Georg know about this? Did you Georg? I want to know. Or is there really something mysterious about gin and tonic?
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Douglas Adam, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.