Package stores was: 2004 Chateau HautRian Senator Joseph Lieberman said: "My dad lived in an orphanage when he was a child. He went to work in a bakery truck and then owned a package store in Stamford, Conn." The week before, however, in a speech to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Hartford, Lieberman used the phrase liquor store. Crawford Lincoln of Brimfield, Mbutt., asks, "Was this a gentler locution to soften the image of his family's business for a national audience?" I'd say yes, and thereby hangs a euphemism. A package store is a store, not a bar, where liquor is sold by the bottle and not by the drink and where the contents of the "package" is consumed off premises. In 1880, Bradstreet's weekly reported active trade in package houses. In 1890, The London Daily News reported that "Judge Foster recently decided that liquor could only be sold in 'original packages,' which is construed as meaning one or more bottles of beer or whisky. The merchants . . . are not allowed to sell beer or whisky by the glbutt." Our earliest evidence for the phrase package store, I am informed by Joanne Despres at Merriam-Webster, "is an entry in the 1918 Addenda to the New International Dictionary (originally published in 1909), where it is labeled 'cant, U.S."' (Cant means "jargon," and business euphemisms fall into that category.) Let's face it: what the seller is selling is not a package but what is contained in the package, which is liquor. Why the squeamishness about that word? After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, state legislatures had the opportunity to license booze shops and saloons but did not want to upset the many "drys." That led to the linguistic prettification of saloons as taverns and of shops purveying the mother's milk of John Barleycorn as package stores. Maybe the senator uses the terms interchangeably. But I have a hunch that some politically sensitive soul remembered that "drys" still exist and vote and changed the candidate for vice president's word from liquor to package. It shows a sandpapered-fingertip sensitivity to the shades of meaning of words. 
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