brick in one's hat

English

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

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

Used in various constructions, particularly “with a brick in his hat” and “to have a brick in one’s hat”, meaning “to be drunk”.

See Yale quote of 1846 referring to it as a “current phrase”.
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

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