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Bottle however, meaning courage or pluck, is from bottle and glass = arse. So if you say someone's lost their bottle, you're suggesting they pooped themselves in fright.
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That so? Awesome. I had always just assumed it was the idea of courage found in a bottle - like dutch courage - so if you'd lost your bottle, you'd lost your nerve.
That's one of the things that always fascinates me with slang - often they have an actual meaning, a metaphor, or rhyme, well-understood by all at the time they came into currency, then that original meaning fell away yet we still understand the point. We just attach another likely meaning to arrive at the same place.
'tenter hooks' is the classic example, for me. I know we've talked about it before. We all instinctively know what we mean by tenter hooks despite that production process no longer being part of our landscape - most people wouldn't really know what tenter hooks were (or indeed tender hooks - which somehow conveys exactly the same sense ) but the image the word now conjures is just as effective in conveying the same meaning as the original.
I remember an awesome episode of Star Trek Next Gen, where they encountered a race that communicated entirely through metaphor and allegory. Fascinating really. So much of our day-to-day language and expression is indirect.
...... sorry ....bit of a tangent. Just smoked something marvellous.