I just tell folks that I’m holding out for bacon-flavored Guinness stout. They usually nod and back slowly away.

Dear Word Detective: As I ponder the year-over-year increase in seasonal beers, I am sipping a “lemon shandy” and wondering about the origin of the drink name. A quick search gets me to “shandygaff,” but then the trail gets cold and my shandy grows warm. Can you help? — John.

Perhaps. But I should warn you that I am severely beer-ignorant. I decided early on that I really didn’t like the stuff. I probably should have tried harder, but I didn’t realize until way too late that I was cutting myself off from great swaths of life in the US. Some major elements of American culture, such as football, the Eagles and Steve Carell movies, can apparently be properly appreciated only after imbibing mind-numbing quantities of beer. Oh well, maybe next time. The whole boutique micro-brewery scene still mystifies me, however. Isn’t that all sorta like obsessing over the best brand of beef jerky?

Now that I have the vegan fedora-wearing hipster artisanal brewers of Williamsburg mad at me, back to work. You’ll be glad to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that paragon of scholarly sobriety, includes both “shandygaff” and “shandy” (defined as a short form of “shandygaff”). The OED defines “shandygaff” as “A drink composed of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer,” but Merriam-Webster broadens that a bit, declaring the stuff “beer diluted with a non-alcoholic drink (as ginger beer).” The OED entry for “shandy” notes that the word can also be used to mean “a mixture of beer and fizzy lemonade.” The consensus of sources I found is that a shandy can be a “ginger shandy” or a “lemon shandy,” but that substituting any other non-alcoholic ingredient, particularly sweetened fruit syrup, is a demonic perversion of the natural order and cause for social ostracism and possibly actual exorcism. (This sort of combative secret code is yet another good reason I avoid bars.)

The earliest citation offered by the OED for “shandy” is from 1888 (“Sparkling hop, shandy, and other new-fangled drinks.”); the first citation for “shandygaff” is from 1853 (“He taught me … to make shandy-gaff and sherry-cobbler.”).

Unfortunately, while we know when “shandygaff” first appeared, no one seems to have even the faintest glimmer as to where it came from, and every dictionary I’ve checked labels it “origin unknown,” so we’re left to strike out on our own. The word “shandy” by itself is a fairly old (1691) English dialect adjective meaning “boisterous” or “empty headed; half-crazy” (OED), which could be a clue, but this “shandy” is also of unknown origin, so that’s no fun. We’re also still left with the original “gaff” bit to explain. There are several “gaffs” in English, the most common being “gaff” in the sense of “a hooked pole.” Another “gaff” means “a loud outcry” or “nonsense” (possibly from the Old English “gaf-spraec,” blasphemous or scandalous speech, possibly related to the French “gaffe,” verbal blunder). There’s also a “gaff” meaning “a fair” or “a place of lower-class entertainment,” as a music hall, etc.

If any of these have any connection to “shandygaff,” I’d put my money on the one meaning “loud nonsense” because, combined with the “boisterous and silly” sense of “shandy,” you’d have a plausible picture of someone who has spent the evening guzzling “shandygaffs.” But this is all pure speculation, and reverse-engineering words this way is often misleading.

Forget it Jake, it’s cricket.

Dear Word Detective: I have been watching the Olympics up here in Canada, and I keep hearing about “hat tricks.” One of the Canadian women scored three goals in an important soccer match — hat trick. Another, more prominent, athlete won three gold medals — again a hat trick. So I understand that it refers to an individual doing three of something. But what does this have to do with hats? — Harold Russell.

Um, is it safe? Is it safe? I know I sound like the evil Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, but I’ve been hiding from the Olympics for, gosh, must be a couple of months now. I haven’t looked at the TV news or most of the internet at all, but the few headlines that managed to sneak through my blindfold (metaphorical, of course) tended to indicate that the Olympics had taken up permanent residence, like the second cousin who crashes on your couch for a few weeks in July and is somehow still there on New Year’s Eve. So is it over? What year is it?

Speaking of years, I just checked and it turns out that the last time I answered a question about “hat trick” was way back in 1997, which was before Facebook or Twitter or any of the other things I wish it were still before so we could stop them. The slightly mortifying aspect of the fifteen years since I wrote that column is that I still don’t entirely understand the particulars of the term’s origins. I know where and when it first appeared, but the exact situation it described remains as opaque to me today as it was then. You’ll understand in a moment.

“Hat trick” is a term used in sports to describe a single player or athlete scoring three goals (or whatever) in one game or match. So if I were to score three goals in quick succession in a hockey game (after first learning to skate, in my case), that would be hailed by the gang in the broadcast booth as a “hat trick.” The term is also used by extension for a threefold success in nearly any other activity, from selling three used cars in one afternoon to getting yourself arrested three times in a row for mopery in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is very strict about mopery. Don’t ask.

The term “hat trick” first appeared in Britain, in the late 19th century, and it comes from the game of cricket, which is where things get a little bit sticky, explanation-wise, because I have never understood cricket. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a “hat trick” means “The feat of a bowler who takes three wickets by three successive balls: originally considered to entitle him to be presented by his club with a new hat or some equivalent.” I suppose a really good player would have had to rent a room to store all those nifty hats; that’s probably why they eventually switched to rewarding athletic success with buckets of money.

“Hat tricks” are noted in other sports as well, most notably horse racing, where a “hat trick” consists of a single jockey winning three races in one day. In hockey, there are two kinds of “hat tricks,” the simple sort being one player scoring three goals in one game. When a hockey player scores three goals in succession with no other scores interrupting, it’s called a “natural hat trick.” There’s also a “hat trick” in baseball, which consists of a player hitting a single, a double, a triple and a home run all in one game. This sort of hat trick is, unsurprisingly, quite rare, so it would be slightly tacky on such an occasion to point out that “hat trick” in this sense describes four, not three, events.

I should probably note, just for the record, that “hat trick” can also mean, according to the OED, “Any trick with a hat, e.g., one performed by a conjurer.” I’m hoping there’s a special term for a magician who manages to produce three rabbits from the same hat. On such an occasion, of course, a new hat would probably be very welcome.