Note 546 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 3)
Reading edition
I am indebted to Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, for the following explanation of this, to me, very perplexing allusion: “Nic, or, more correctly, nick,—namely, ‘a raised or indented bottom in a beer-can, by which the customers were cheated, the nick below and the froth above filling up part of the measure.’ I take this definition from Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English. That the expression was a common one the following quotations prove:—
‘We must be running up and downe With cannes of beere (malt sod in fishes broth), And those they say are fil’d with nick and froth.’ (Rowland’s Knave of Harts.)
‘From the nick and froth of a penny pot-house.’ (Fletcher.)
‘Our pots were full quarted, We were not thus thwarted With froth-canne and nick-pot, And such nimble quick shot.’
(Spurious lines added to Rand’s 1624 edition of Skelton’s Elynour Rummynge.) Most of this information I have taken from Nares’s Glossary and Halliwell-Phillipp’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, second edition.”