Whatever else you do, don’t fall off the wagon

Country Living with Francis Farragher

The other night, as the hostelry conversation oscillated rather waywardly between climate change, the improving bog, scarce summer hay and who would form the next Government, inevitably the chat made its way back to local gossip, when a contributor remarked that an individual ‘had fallen off the wagon again’.

It referred to someone who had been off the drink for some time, and who over recent weeks, had ‘hit the bottle’ and the phrase brought me back to a little gem of a book that I read a few years back, entitled By Hook or by Crook, written by David Crystal.

The book traced the origin of a whole range of phrases and expressions that through the years, and indeed over the centuries, have made their way into the everyday language of the masses.

Falling off the wagon has its roots in the late 1800s period and centred on a temperance movement that was spreading through the USA, something of a forerunner to our modern Irish pioneers.

The zealousness of those early ‘pioneers’ who had changed their ways knew no bounds apparently, and they found it hard to restrain themselves in terms of making public utterances as to the things they would do, rather than go back on the demon drink.

At the time in the USA, during the parched dry summers, water carts were used to dampen down the dusty roads. Needless to say this water would not be very palatable, half boiled by the baking sun, and containing an assortment of dead insects.

The pledge from the men of abstinence at the time was that they would prefer to stay on the water cart and drink the stenching water, than fall off the wagon and go back to the God forsaken practice of ‘sculling’ beer and whiskey.

So if you opted to leave the water cart, or ‘fall off the wagon’, it meant that you had opted to go back again on the booze. Maybe the same rule could be applied when we bring home the turf, as luck would have it, passing the local tavern on the way home.

If we stay on the wagon (nowadays the Massey Ferguson or equivalent), then it’ll mean a dry arrival with the winter fuel, but if there’s a stop along the way, then we’ve slipped up again and fallen off.

Another curious little one from David Crystal is that less than complimentary term used for people with an exceptionally inquisitive nose, that at times leads them into a situation where they go a bit too far, taking a peep at clothes lines or into neighbours’ bedrooms. Such creepy creatures get the name of Peeping Toms.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.