December 15, 2000

on or off the wagon

Could you please explain what the term being off the wagon is intended to mean in relation to drinking? And where it originates from?

The graphic pair of metaphors--on and off the wagon-- has been associated with battling the booze for around one hundred years. The sequence of actions is something like this: Someone decides or pledges to abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages, usually after a period of excessive drinking but sometimes for religious or other reasons. Having stopped, this person is on the wagon. If the person then takes a drink or--especially--starts drinking again habitually, he or she has fallen off the wagon. In other words, a person must have been on the wagon for a time in order to be regarded as off the wagon. And ordinarily one must already be something of a drinker before one can go on the wagon in the first place.

The origin of on the wagon becomes clearer in its early forms: on the water wagon and on the water cart. Horse-drawn water carts did not, as one might think, distribute drinking water, but were used during the late 19th century, especially during hot, dry summers, to wet down dusty roads. This was a period of active crusading, with women--and a few men--campaigning fervently for Prohibition on a national scale. Members of such organizations as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (formed in 1893) were trying desperately to close down breweries and saloons, which had proliferated extensively. They hoped to eliminate or reduce domestic abuse by encouraging sobriety in husbands and fathers.

During this period, many of the men who pledged to stop drinking couched their vows in terms that said that no matter how much they longed for a strong drink, they would climb aboard a water cart to quench their thirst rather than break their vow. I'm on the water cart came to mean "No, thank you; I'm not drinking any more" or "I'm trying to stop." As the metaphor became more popular, wagon overtook cart in the American idiom; cart is still in use in England. The notion that you could easily fall off the wagon was apparently recognized early on. And of course drinking is no longer considered an exclusively male problem.

The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (Hendrickson, 1997) claims that the earliest literary citation for "I'm on the water cart" occurs in "of all places, Alice Caldwell Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), where the consumptive Mr. Dick says it to old Mrs. Wiggs." This antedates the OED's earliest attestation, a 1904 definition from American Dialect Notes indicating that the phrase means 'to abstain from hard drinks'.

A search in Nexis, while yielding many modern quotes that do refer to hard drinking, clearly reveals that both the "on" and "off" forms of the metaphor have been extended. Way out. They are now used for dieting (or not), exercising (or not), and even for government spending sprees: "Now that Congress and the Clinton White House have fallen back off the wagon, Bush and Gore's long-term projections [for using the budget surplus] are almost meaningless" (St. Petersburg Times, Fla., November 2, 2000). In one bizarre citation, the metaphor extends to spates of serial killing! "But while Yates has a few traits that set him apart from most serial killers, experts doubt that includes a killing hiatus. [Yet] his confession seems to indicate he didn't murder at all for two long periods--13 years, then eight years--before falling off the wagon each time" (The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, October 26, 2000). Apparently off and on the wagon can refer to a return to any vice. Or vice versa.

Enid