Here’s some remarkably cool charts on the history of the word “addiction” & the language surrounding the word. Linguists will delight at these stunning graphs, charting the history of “addiction” in the U.S. and spotlighting how the meanings of certain words related to addictive behavior have shifted over time.
The language of addiction is always evolving. Maybe we need an addictionary. For example, when the word “alcohol” was written or spoken in early 19th-century America. it was often used in the chemical and medical sense.
The word “cocaine” had different connotations as well. In the 1860s, for instance, a substance termed “cocaine” was advertised by a Boston company as a topical treatment to prevent hair loss.
Over time these words – “alcohol”, “cocaine” and others, including “drugs” and” intoxicated” – became more closely associated with substance use/abuse & addiction in American popular culture.
Abusive Language
So what does the history of language usage tell us about how the conversation around addiction and substance abuse has changed over time? Like any other topics, drug addiction and alcoholism have been the subject of major fluctuations in both cultural attitudes and scientific knowledge – Sumerians were writing about herbal medicines as early as 1700 B.C.
The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is an online database containing some 115,000 textual sources and roughly 400 million words written and spoken between 1810 and 2009. Using COHA to examine trends in the discussion of drugs over the past 200 years, 7 common words related to substance abuse/addiction are charted for their frequency, then measured with other words used in proximity to each addiction-related word since 1815. Take a look at the findings to see how the words we associate with substance-abuse/addiction have changed throughout history.
Addicted
While many of the terms studied hit their peak in the latter half of the 20th century, “addicted” got a strong start in the early 1800s. In that era, the word was commonly used in conjunction with “habit” and in condemnations of “vices” as well as any frowned-upon “practice” or “pursuits.” Reporting on European events in 1896, a writer for the Ironwood News-Record in Michigan noted that “the queen of Portugal is addicted to masculine pursuits.”
Alcohol
Mentions of “alcohol” have grown steadily from 1810 to the present. But until 1900, the term was paired with “drugs” almost exclusively. At that point, terminology from scientific literature such as “wood” alcohol and “denatured” alcohol began to appear as well as later industrial uses for alcohol involving “cellulose” and “shellac.”
Alcoholism
“Alcoholism” made its debut in the lexicon around 1900, associated almost exclusively with “crime” and “dreams” – coincidentally around the time that Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was published. However, the association with crime was soon eclipsed by concern over “chronic” alcoholism and “death” related to alcoholism, which ballooned in the 1920s during the height of the prohibition movement. Documentarian Ken Burns echoes this in his series, Prohibition. One of the tragic unintended consequences of the nationwide crackdown on alcohol was an increase in dangerous, unregulated spirits — leading to 1,000 deaths a year.
Cocaine
Unlike most other terms “cocaine” barely appeared at all until the 1970s when the drug became more prevalent in the U.S.
Drugs
The term “drugs” was mentioned at relatively low levels before skyrocketing from 1950 to the present, and it’s now the most commonly used word of the group.
Intoxicated
“Intoxicated” peaked in the 1800s, with its frequency declining by more than two-thirds in the present day. Note that the area graph doesn’t cover the same time period as the frequency chart just above it — 1815-2015 vs.1815-1995 — because during the 19th century, it was used to refer to being intoxicated by “liquor,” but also in a more metaphorical sense – à la intoxicated by “beauty.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, take the first step towards recovery by downloading the free Addicaid app for iPhone + Android to join a recovery community today.
[h/t: NPR History Dept. + Recovery.org]