Humor
The term comes from an 1890 Supreme Court decision allowing liquor to be shipped across state lines to “package stores.”
Welcome to “The Salty Cod,” a monthly column in which humorist Steve Calechman grapples with uniquely New England dilemmas.
Illustration by Dale Stephanos
The short answer is that we can’t help ourselves. The term package store originates from an 1890 Supreme Court decision that established the “original package” as a legal concept—essentially a loophole allowing liquor to be shipped across state lines as long as it arrived sealed and unaltered, according to Robert Moss, author of Southern Spirits. Post-prohibition, states adopted “package store” as a licensed retail designation, the logic being that liquor sold in its original, sealed package hadn’t been tampered with or watered down.
While we like to believe everything belongs to us, other states—Georgia, the Carolinas, and Texas—refer to them as “package stores,” too. But they say the whole thing. Every syllable. Because they have time for that down there. The term “packie”? That’s all ours. When exactly it was said for the first time is tough to pin down, but a good guess would be somewhere around December 5, 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified by the necessary 36th state—buy a round for Utah—and Prohibition was over. Most likely, it wasn’t until December 6, since the vote wasn’t official until 5:32 p.m. EST.
So let’s say Boston’s first package store opened at 11 a.m. that day. There’s no chance it even got to 1:30 p.m. before someone on Tremont was calling out, “Helen, I’ll be back in 30 minutes. Makin’ a packie run.” Of course we were going to immediately shorten the full name, because we shorten everything. Pike. Mass Ave. Dot Ave. Dot. Yaz. P-town. Southie. Rozzie. Eastie. J.P. Sox. Bs. Revs. Cs. Pats. O’B. Geils. (That J is just too taxing.)
Part of it is making it our own. Part of it is efficiency, because we don’t have time for more than seven letters. But the biggest thing—the thing that great, unknown American understood in that early afternoon of December 6, 1933—is that there was no way to say “package” with a Boston accent. Go ahead, try it…exactly.
