WHY DO WE SAY — ?

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 42, 20 February 1933, Page 6

WHY DO WE SAY — ?

"DRUNK AS A LORD."

(By A Correspondent.) A whole book could easily be written concorning the countless phrases now or formerly applicable to drunken men, and the history of their origins would occupy many pages. It would be very difficult, however, to make clear the difference—if there is any—between the various similes which define a degree of intoxication. Does "as drunk as a prince" indicate as bad a condition as "drunk as a boiled owl," and is "drunk as a fish" a worse state of affairs than "drunk as a mouse"? But these are only a few of the terms thus used, many of them inexplicable, and we find also that a man may be as drunk as an emperor, a piper, a tinker, a beggar, a fiddler, while among the animals rats, sows, swine, apes and mice have acquired thus notoriety for Intemperance. A second glance at the above list shows that most of those expressions are little, if at all, used to-day, and, on consideration, we realise that the most usual of such terms at the present time when, perhaps, such an expression is not so often necessary, is "as drunk as a lord." The pages of English history are full of the time when beer was one of the glories of the country and not a bad word was said against it, and it was in connection with the popularity of "strong wine" among the nobles that the simile under our notice came into being. It was, as Brewer puts it, "before the great temperance movement set in in the latter half of the nineteenth century," that "those who could afford it thought it quite 'comme il faut' to drink two, three or even more bottles of port wine for dinner." Particularly towards the end of the eighteenth century, to be more exact, every English "gentleman" was an, inveterate drinker, and. every dinner ended with most, if not all, of the diners in a state of drunkenness, generally so helpless that they rolled under the table in a disgraceful manner. Disgraceful, that is, from our point of view, for in those days a noble would be considered rather "soft" if he drank no more than three bottles of wine. Under these conditions, everybody drank as much as they could afford, and thus it came about that the peers of the realm acquired their reputation for drunkenness, for the aristocracy had little limit to the extent of their indulgence. It may be that the. phrase "as drunk as a lord" originated on the lips of some poorer person, not in a. way to show disgust, but rather to show envy of those more "fortunate" than himself.