You’ve all seen it. You go to a liquor store to buy some hard alcohol. Whiskey, tequila, vodka, whatever your personal choice of brain cell killer you like. As you inspect your potential buy, somewhere on the bottle you come by a few printed letters which read, “60 proof.” It might read another number proof, but disregard that for now. Do you know what the term “proof” on liquor bottles actually refers to?

The common answer to this is that the term proof is twice the percentage of alcohol by volume in the given bottle of liquor you are drinking from; however, this is not the case. Here is the truth: the term “proof” gets its derivation from 18th Century British sailors who were in the rum business. To make sure that the rum they were transported had not been watered down, a part of their rum shipment would be generously sprinkled with gunpowder. Once the gunpowder set in, the sailors would then proceed to try to set the beverage on fire. If the rum did not ignite, the alcohol was proven to contain too much water to pass as proper rum. Thus, the term “proof” refers to rum which contained 57.15 percent ethanol that would, when a flame was put to it, ignite.

You might be wondering if this is a true statement or not. I ensure you it is. However, you are entitled to your opinion and you still might think that I am full of it. You might be thinking to yourself how silly or laughable the above answer might be. Again, you are entitled to your opinion, and so am I. But here’s the thing, in this writer’s opinion, now a days, including this column and all the others contained in these pages, there are far too many opinions. Everyone has one.

The local barber has a somewhat well thought out opinion on how to take care of the U.S. border control problem. The local mailman has a somewhat well thought out opinion on whether or not Tom Brady deserves to be dating whatever the hell supermodel he is currently dating. You probably have a somewhat thought out, logical opinion on why or why not you should finally turn around and tell that noisy couple in class to s.t.f.u.

According to Esquire staff writer Tom Chiarella, “