Who Bleached my Martini?

Winston Churchill was a brilliant statesman, a courageous leader and one of the most dynamic personalities of the twentieth century. That having been said, the man did not know how to make a martini.
In stead of pouring a cold glass of gin while looking at a bottle of vermouth, I maintain that the only lexical entry for the word 'martini' is a mixture of six parts British gin to one part dry vermouth which is subsequently shaken (never stirred) over crushed ice and strained into a chilled cocktail glass.  An olive or lemon peel is optional, and a bit superfluous if you ask me.  However, I find myself on the loosing side of the harsh mistress that is semantic bleaching.

Semantic bleaching is a somewhat imprecise term used by linguists to describe the process by which a word looses its specificity.  A word which once had a precise, narrow meaning can be used for an increasingly larger and broader, and sometimes more abstract, set of connotations.  Eventually, a word may shrivel like an over-brined olive, becoming a suffix or a particle which nothing left but a grammatical function.

While I shudder to hear the word "vodka" immediately preceding "martini," others have no compunction modifying my beloved drink's name with such nouns as "chocolate," "raspberry" and "pomegranate."  A few years ago, a friend of mine was a bar manager at a downtown cigar and cocktail establishment where drink prices started at around twelve to fifteen dollars.  Imagine my horror when I was handed a document which purported to be a "martini menu" on my first visit.  I would have been outraged if I was actually paying for my drinks at the time.

Whereas "martini" is for me the name of a very specific mixed drink, among others the word has acquired a wider, more general meaning of "any mixed drink served in a cocktail glass."  By the time we reach that neon green monstrosity, the Apple-tini, it no longer possesses the dignity of an independent morpheme, clinging to the end of the word like a lush clutching a bar to avoid falling off his stool.

There's nothing that can be done, of course, to turn the oceanic currents of language change.  But I take a small satisfaction in the belief that even Winston Churchill and I could agree that there is no such thing as a "chocolate martini."


Postscript: I almost forgot to add one of my favorite bad linguistics jokes-

A linguist walks into a bar and tells the bartender he’d like a 'martinus.’ The bartender says: Don’t you mean  martini? And the linguist says: Of course not, I only want one.