The Roaring Twenties
They roared with alcohol
I like to use Fridays to prime readers' drinking pipes. Let the California sobers toke the road to existential relief, I'll resort to a few drinks.
But dang it, those Medicine 2.0 neo-Prohibitionists are making it hard. Huberman: any alcohol is bad for you.
Of course, Huberman's not really a neo-Prohibitionist. Ya have to be a prick to be a Prohibitionist, and Huberman aint no prick, at least not on his podcast. He cushions all his advice with the observation that he's just relaying summaries of what the current science shows, a cushion that comes with the implication that the current science will change (such non-dogmatism is the X-Generation Way, which contrasts sharply with the Boomer Way, but that's a different essay).
For my health, I'm leaning on that implication: the current science that condemns all drinking will eventually surrender to new studies that show it's actually good for you, at least in moderation. I believe it's inevitable because I believe in Tradition, and Tradition--from the Wedding at Cana to the Roaring Twenties--celebrates alcohol, even excessive amounts occasionally.
I guess it's no surprise that my favorite writers--Chesterton, Mencken, and increasingly Wodehouse--reached their apogee in the Twenties and under the influence. It was such an inebriated decade, Edmund Wilson recorded more than 100 synonyms for "drunk" in his Lexicon of Prohibition (1927).
Wodehouse repeatedly used the era's mass drunkenness to get laughs. His terms for hangovers included "the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer, and the Gremlin Boogie." And his euphemisms for inebriation are seemingly endless:
awash
boiled
fried to the tonsils
full to the back teeth
hooched
illuminated
lit up
lathered
off colour
oiled
ossified
pie-eyed (this one would come back in the late twentieth-century to describe getting really stoned)
polluted
primed
scrooched
squiffy
stewed to the gills
stinko
tanked
tight as an owl
under the sauce
whiffled
woozled.
So, although I can't encourage that my TDE readers go out and get whiffled and woozled, I'm equally compelled to push back against the neo-Prohibitionists, which is one reason I continued this 20-year tradition of trying to post something drinking-related on Friday.
Source: Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life, pp. 166-167.