Most of us enjoy a good celebratory alcoholic beverage, so it's no surprise that a whole

subculture of urban myths have sprung up around them. We didn't episode before where

we put these myths to the test, but it turned out there were far too many of them for one

show. And so today, we've got the second round. More alcohol myths, guaranteed to make

your next beverage even more factual. And that's up next on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. More alcohol myths.

Apparently, there are more than a few Skeptoid listeners who will, on occasion,

refresh with a palliative inebrient. Because episode 619 about alcohol myths continues to draw

more than its fair share of traffic. Any activity as widely practiced and as liberating as the

consumption of alcoholic beverages is sure to become adorned with mythology and oddball traditions.

So there's no shortage of such popular beliefs for us to examine here. Last time, we didn't manage

to squeeze in whether the beer before liquor and wine before beer rhymes are backed up by any

solid evidence. So we'll cover that one today along with a few others. A word of caution. If,

in this episode, you happen to hear me use a phrase with which you're not familiar. It's likely

that it is a selection from Benjamin Franklin's famous list of over 200 terms for being intoxicated.

It features such favorites as... Bean before George, contending with Pharaoh, lost his rudder...

And casting up his accounts. And Benjamin Franklin's list is as good an alcohol myth to start with as

any, as Franklin is almost certainly not its original author. Tragic news, indeed, do Franklin

fans everywhere. We'd like to imagine him riding it with his quill one evening, while in a

condition in which he owed no mana forthing. While Franklin's 1737, the drinker's dictionary,

contained 229 terms, and he later added several more, a similar list of 237 terms was published

much earlier in the New England Weekly Journal in 1736. It included seven terms that were different

...