brick in one's hat

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English

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Etymology

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

Pronunciation

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Noun

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brick in one's hat

  1. (New England, obsolete, idiomatic) Drunkenness.
    • 1846 November, “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, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 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

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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

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References

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  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