hootch

Over dinner we taught our new traveling companions the limited Mongolian horse vocabulary we’d learned online: “choo” for go, “hootch” for stop.

Stiffly, like a stranger, Sanders moved across the hootch and lay down with a magazine and pretended to read.

An unparliamentary version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is one long procession of dinners and hootch."

Always he brought a bottle, and the excellent "hootch," as he called it, did much to make our lives bearable.

"Yes, that's what they say back East; but when you get up town you'll find every second place a saloon with all the hootch you want to drink, or have money to pay for."