Tie One On!!

Since NaBloPoMo's theme for this month is "ties", and since I decided to try and write something each and every day this month, I immediately began thinking of all the ways you could use "ties" in a blog post. Today, my brilliant mind came up with "Tie One On", and I immediately began to wonder about the origins of that phrase. Google sent me straigt to the Maven's Word of the Day, and sure enough, I found what I needed. I thought you might also enjoy what "the Maven" had to say about the matter:

There are two explanations for tie one on. The first answers the obvious question: "Tie one what on?" The missing piece is a bun. It seems that the expression we all know, tie one on, may actually bean abbreviated version of some older expressions that I had never heard, like get a bun on, have a bun on, or tie a bun on.

So, what do buns have to do with getting drunk? Excellent question. For the past hundred years or so, a bun has been slang for 'a state of drunkenness': "Can you recall those days? The Naughty Nineties? The days when a bender was called a bun; when a man who was frequently intoxicated was an old toper and not a souse?" (Shay, Pious Friends, 1927).

And that's where the trail goes cold. Why the word bun was ever related to drunkeness is a mystery. In all of the expressions, the operative preposition is "on." Whether there was actually a fraternity or some other happy group of people that at one time literally tied buns on, or whether it was an ancient, long-forgotten sobriety test (-"Walk with this bun on your head if you are sober" -"Boy, Fred is so drunk he's tied one on to pass the test!") we will never know.

The bun citations become more scarce in the 1970s and fade away altogether in the 1980s. Today, tie one on is much more frequently found than any of the older expressions about the bun.

The second explanation for tie one on avoids mentioning the bun altogether. Instead, it points to the sister phrase hang one on. Both hang one on and the bun-less tie one on first appeared in the 1930s. The evidence does not clearly show which expression came first, and arguments that hang one on is related to hangover are pure speculation.

So it seems that we have an entire cluster of expressions with lost, blank, and forgotten origins. How appropriate that tie one on and the other drinking-buddy expressions have a common morning-after problem like forgetting where they have been.

Heather

Perhaps I don't know any more about "tying one on" than I did before, but it was a good way to accomplish another day's posting about "ties"!