Wine, women and song

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The cliché "wine, women, and song" is a rhetorical figure of a triad or hendiatris. Similar tripartite mottoes have existed for a long time in many languages, for example:

  • Bengali/Hindi/Sanskrit - "Sur, Sura, Sundari" (music, wine and woman)
  • Czech - "Víno, ženy a zpěv" (wine, women and song)
  • Danish - "Vin, kvinder og sang" (wine, women and song)
    • also "Øl, fisse og hornmusik" (beer, a slang word for female genitals, and horn music)
    • also "Tjald og lal og lir" (slang words for cannabis, fooling around, and being sexually aroused)
  • German - "Wein, Weib und Gesang" (wine, women and song)
  • Hindi/Urdu - "Kabab, Sharab aur Shabab" (meat, wine and women/beauty)
  • Norwegian - "Piker, vin og sang" (women, wine and song)
  • Polish - "Wino, kobiety i śpiew"
  • Swedish - "Vin, kvinnor och sång" (wine, women and song)

"Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll" is a modern variation of it. The terms correspond to wine, women and song with edgier and updated vices. The term came to prominence in the sixties as rock and roll music, opulent and intensely public lifestyles, as well as what some saw as "liberal morals", came into the mainstream.

"Rum, bum, and concertina" is a British naval equivalent. Another British naval equivalent is "rum, sodomy and the lash".

Not all hendiatris including women are positive: in Greek - "Πύρ, γυνή και θάλαττα" ("fire, women and the sea") instead suggest three dangers rather than pleasures, and Turkish At, Avrat, Silah ("horse, woman, weapon") offers the three essentials of quite another culture.

The following "tetrad" (using four concepts rather than three) predates all of the above:

  • Persian "دویار زیرک و از باده کهن دو منی فراغتی و کتابی و گوشه چمنی" a popular rubaiyyat (quatrain) by Omar Khayyám (1048-1131):
"Two sweethearts,
Two flasks of old wine,
A book of verse
And a cosy corner in the garden."
The lines are more freely translated, and more familiar in Edward FitzGerald's final synthesis (1889) of Khayyam's rubaiyyat:
"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"
—Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain xii.

The phrase may have also originated with the following couplet:

The waltz "Wine, Women and Song" (Wein, Weib und Gesang) is Op. 333 (1869) of Johann Strauss II.

The lines Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue/Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang (German women, German loyalty/Germany wine, and German song) are found in the (never sung) second verse of Das Lied der Deutschen, the third verse of which is the German national anthem.

The British poet and mystic Aleister Crowley, in his work "Energized Enthusiasm," suggests that "wine, woman, and song" may be utilized towards the development of genius in the individual or the attainment of mystical states.

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