La Sobriedad

Sobriety is not much less than all I know about it. It is a relatively vertical state of affairs, for sure. But it’s no surprise when someone suggests there’s more to it than I think.

The first suggestion is that sobriety is not just not drinking. That should have been obvious, for drunkenness is not just drinking. But a dull bulb sizzles on, anyway, and flickers further when the person who suggests there is more to sobriety adds that he is working on the quality, if you please, of his.

Thus a modest confidence is greatly increased in modesty. I turned to the OED. The first definition:

“sobriety/n. LME [(O) Fr. Sobriété or L sobrietas, f. sobrius SOBER a. see – ITY.] 1 The quality of being sober or moderate; avoidance of excess; spec. moderation in drinking alcohol.”

That sobriety is “the quality of being sober” is fine as far as it goes, which is nowhere. No doubt it’s true, and as helpful as knowing that drunkenness is the quality of being drunk. So my new-found authority on sobriety is working on the quality of the quality of being sober, which doesn’t tell us much.

The “avoidance of excess, specifically moderation in drinking alcohol” is better inasmuch as it at least mentions alcohol, but the alcoholic has to sniff. The avoidance of excess and moderation in drinking alcohol might be what “sobriety” means to those for whom “the quality of being sober” comes naturally, but it is not what it means to alcoholics. Nor is it what it means to those for whom “the quality of being sober” comes with a partner or friend who is an alcoholic. In both cases “I’ve only had four” means “the quality of being nuts.”

So opening the OED - to the entry between Sobranye (“The Parliament or national assembly of Bulgaria”) and sobriquet (“An epithet, a nickname”) - is like opening a can of worms for the alcoholic. Not only does he (or she) not really know what sober means, now he (or she) has to recognize that he (or she) no longer confidently speaks his (or her) own language. One man’s “avoidance of excess" is another man's poison. Or woman’s.

This is a turn up for the books.

And switching languages won’t help. The Spanish Royal Academy fares no better than the Oxford lexicographers: “sobriedad. (Del lat. sobrietas, -ātis). 1. f. Cualidad de sobrio.” Indeed.

None of this is to blame the sober wordsmiths, although that’s always tempting: what do they know of sobriety, after all, who only sobriety know? What do they know of the vertical who have only ever been upright? Well, a little more, you might suggest, than those who only drunkenness know, those who have lain down the full length of the horizontal and refused to get up.

It’s not the scholars’ fault that the alcoholic, armed with a few foreign phrases and a list of bars the length of his arm, embarked abroad and came back with half a new language and having forgotten half the old one.

Regardless, it is a bit like getting lost in translation. This causes rather obvious difficulties for the alcoholic who would communicate with the outside world (with “earth people” or “civilians”).

But there is advantage, too: the recovering alcoholic is an explorer here, and sobriety is not simply new to him in a way that is familiar to others; it is a new thing altogether, and he or she is its poet. Or he (or she) would be were it not for those clever, cagey bastards at the OED, who hedge their bets on sobriety with the following second meaning:

LME 2 Staidness, seriousness, soundness of judgment: M16.

This is much better. Staidness (the quality of being settled in faith or purpose, or settled in character and conduct, dignified, serious) is good, seriousness (the quality of having, involving, expressing, or arising from earnest purposes, being sedate in disposition or intention, responsible, not reckless, etc.) perhaps less so. But “soundness of judgment” is excellent. “Soundness of judgment” sounds a lot like sanity, and sanity sounds a lot like the quality sought by the knowing, powerless drunk.

There’s more, of course, but it’s not a bad hasty first draft for the revised edition:

sobriety/n. EAA 1 A relatively vertical state of affairs. MAA 2 Not not drinking. MAA 3 Soundness of judgment, sanity, spec. soundness of judgment and sanity regarding alcohol and alcoholism; 4 LAA A work in progress.