Why are soft drinks, such as lemonade etc., called soft drinks?
Learn English – Why “soft” drink
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Etymonline says:
ladybug
1690s, from lady + bug. The "lady" is the Virgin Mary (cf. Ger. cognate Marienkäfer). In Britain, now usually ladybird beetle (1704), through aversion to the word bug, which there has overtones of sodomy.
As to Lady Bird Johnson, that nickname was given to her by her nurse, as Wikipedia explains:
Though she was named for her mother's brother Claud, during her infancy, her nurse, Alice Tittle, commented, she was as "purty as a ladybird" [...]. That nickname virtually replaced her actual first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady, though her husband called her Bird, which is the name she used on her marriage license. During her teenage years, her schoolmates had called her Bird, though mockingly, since she reportedly was not fond of the name.
Responding to your comment, I will add that both of her parents were natives of Alabama and the nurse was an African American. The Corpus of Historical American Language has these stats for ladybird vs. ladybug:
(X axis: year, Y axis: incidences per million words.)
Maybe looking at its origin will help. SlangDictionary.com defines "nut-job" as:
a more recent variation of nut-case
"Nut-case" being:
a crazy person. A slang version of ‘mental case’ which spread from American speech into British usage at the end of the 1950s.
Thus, if "nut-job" was a mere variant of "nut-case", then, "job" would make sense. A "case" has two meanings:
a person or thing whose plight or situation calls for attention:
A piece of work, specifically defined within a profession.
The second meaning of "case" is synonymous with "job", and thus, in when "nut-case" was given a variation, its synonym "job" was taken and used. Thus, there would be a logical reason why "job" is used here.
Best Answer
This made me think of why hard drinks are alcoholic. I have found that
is probably the origin of hard liquor.
liquor: Narrowed sense of "fermented or distilled drink" (especially wine) first recorded c.1300. To liquor up "get drunk" is from 1845.
Hard meaning intoxicating, spiritous, 'strong'" sense, surprisingly, dates at least from 1879 (see edit below supporting its earlier use), from Boston Times about someone brought up on charges:
For Australia and New Zealand, it's recorded in 1890.
As for soft, "of beverages, non-alcoholic, non-spiritous," there is a citation from 1880 in the OED online, and a quote from 1891 by a brigade commander, General Robinson, that of the "Canteen" or "Post Exchange" system.
There is a British Soft Drinks History devoted to soft drinks. They state that soft was first described as small, and note that a tombstone of 1764 records
Edited to note: StonyB has found an 1843 book (British?) with a very interesting phrase. While reflecting on the perils of idleness, Luke Hansard states that two men could be persuades to fight (for entertainment) by use of "soft sawder" (which actually means flattery) and hard liquor. So clearly, hard for strong alcoholic beverages was in use by the early 1840s. To StonyB: Great find!