In an article about the origins of the beverage's many names, the author says: "The popular nicknames for cachaça also mentioned on the company’s site are similarly hard to swallow: pinga, for instance, which means drops and refers to the condensed drops of sugar cane juice that landed on the backs of the enslaved workers. Worse is aguardente—firewater—a reference to how those drops burned the backs of workers bearing wounds from the whip."[14]