brick in one's hat

brick in one's hat

English

Etymology

US, circa 1846.[1] Presumably due to staggering walk when drunk; compare top-heavy with drink.[2]

Pronunciation

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Noun

brick in one's hat

1. (New England, obsolete, idiomatic) Drunkenness.
   • 1846 November 1, “Magnelia Pedestria; or, Leaves from a Pedestrian’s Note Book”, in The Yale Literary Magazine, volume 12, number 1, page 33:

     Seated at the same table with our Mr.—, was a gentleman, who, to use the current phrase, ‘had a brick in his hat.’

   • 1849, Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Kavanagh, pages 177–178:

     Her husband had taken to the tavern, and often came home very late, “with a brick in his hat,” as Sally expressed it.

Usage notes

Used in various constructions, particularly “with a brick in his hat” and “to have a brick in one’s hat”, meaning “to be drunk”.

Synonyms

• See Thesaurus:drunkenness

Related terms

• ants in one's pants
• flea in one's ear
• frog in one's throat
• thorn in one's side
• wolf in one's stomach

References

1. See Yale quote of 1846 referring to it as a “current phrase”.
2. John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, 1905, p. 216

• Richard Hopwood Thornton, An American Glossary, Volume 1, 1912, p. 101
• Hendrickson, Robert (2000) The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 239