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# The Roaring Twenties
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/the-roaring-twenties/
- Published: 2026-02-06T13:00:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-03-15T12:02:55.000Z
- Description: They roared with alcohol (Mini-Essay)
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Drinking

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**](https://drunkard.com/01-04-plum-brandy-2/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com). 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***](https://amzn.to/4qoUxlJ?ref=thedailyeudemon.com), pp. 166-167.