I have chosen alcohol as my word this week, so all of you under 21 should stop reading right now. Anyway, I know none of you underage college students would let alcohol even touch your lips.
As Cal Poly students, we have been bombarded with those “Under Four” campaign ads. Personally, I feel a night of “Under Four” is not that much different from a night of being the “designated driver,” but I can appreciate the general goal of the ad campaign: If college students understand more about the use of alcohol, then they will make more responsible decisions concerning alcohol.
The “Under Four” phrase comes from a statistic that says the majority of Cal Poly students drink four or less drinks in a given sitting, 25 percent less than what they think everyone else is drinking.
While I truly enjoy some of the “Under Four” posters1, trying to calculate the average amount of drinks I have in a given sitting is just too complicated for this liberal arts major. What am I supposed to do? Keep a detailed record of how much I drink for a month, then use Excel to compute my average per sitting? Does that mean it’s OK to blackout on Saturday night, then have one drink every day for the next six days so I average under four? These conundrums have caused me to abandon the “Under Four” strategy and create my own.
I call my drinking responsibly strategy “Under 10.” The idea is as follows: Under no circumstance should anyone of my size2 ever consume more than 10 servings of alcohol in a given 24 hour period. This is a simple system (assuming you can count to 103 ) that allows one to participate in drinking games without vomiting in the backyard. To implore the Under 10 strategy, you need to know exactly how many servings of alcohol are in your drink of choice. So, I have compiled a list4 of approximate serving sizes:
1. Beer: 12 ounces
2. Wine: 5 ounces
3. Hard Alcohol (80 proof): 1.5 ounces
So, a Long Island Iced Tea would count as four servings of alcohol, not one drink. And, while a red plastic cup of beer only counts as one, a red plastic cup of wine counts as two servings of alcohol. Unless, of course, you’re drinking that wine straight from the box, in which case you’re definitely no longer “Under 10.”
Marci Palla is a public policy graduate student and a Mustang Daily humor columnist. “Marci’s Word of the Week” explores some of the more important vernacular of college life, one word at a time.
1. They remind me of the good times, because, as Asher Roth would say, “Time isn’t wasted when you’re getting wasted.”
2. 5-foot-7-inches, 150 pounds
3. If you can’t, just get someone to make sharpie marks on your arm every time you consume a serving of alcohol. Trust me, plenty of people will jump at the chance to get to write on you.
4. With information I got from Wikipedia of course