A poet calling himself Satyrical Dick wrote how a “jolly wine-cooper” could combine a “pint of old port” with some rough Spanish wine and thus “could counterfeit claret the best of the sort”.
The kind of shopping — where you hand over notes and count out change in return — now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters, like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a corner shop.
The preferred tipple for most people on St Patrick's Day is a pint of Irish stout, a heavy, black beer, although others may plump for a glass of Irish whiskey.
If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent.