Dear Geist,

To get right to the point, what are staggers and jags?

—Stan Rogers fan, Halifax NS

Dear Stan fan,

First, we’ll encourage readers of Advice for the Lit-Lorn to check out the life and music of the late Stan Rogers. One of Rogers’s most beloved songs, “Barrett’s Privateers,” was based on more than one true story of privateering in the late eighteenth century. At one point in the song, the cook on the ship is said to have “staggers and jags,” a colloquial expression for delirium tremens, or possibly a reference to the listing ship.

The only other reference to the term staggers that we have seen is in the journals of Samuel Pepys, a seventeenth-century administrator of the navy of England and Member of Parliament, who kept detailed accounts of his personal and business life. On September 5, 1667, Pepys wrote this account: “During a ride home one of our coach-horses fell sick of the staggers, so as he was ready to fall down. The coachman was fain to ’light, and hold him up, and cut his tongue to make him bleed, and his tail. The horse continued shaking every part of him, as if he had been in an ague, a good while, and his blood settled in his tongue, and the coachman thought and believed he would presently drop down dead; then he blew some tobacco in his nose, upon which the horse sneezed, and, by and by, grows well, and draws us the rest of our way, as well as ever he did; which was one of the strangest things of a horse I ever observed, but he says it is usual. It is the staggers.”

We have spent some time looking up both staggers and staggers and jags, but even the wonderful World Wide Words website is silent on this one.

—The Editors