Name: Drunk Mary Poppins. 
 
 Age: The east wind first blew her into 17 Cherry Tree Lane in 1934. 
 
 Appearance: Magical/sozzled. 
 
 No! Not another icon fallen. I can’t bear it. To see Mary Poppins reduced to this by the demon drink … That I should have lived so long. Relax, it’s not that bad. 
 
 Oh, really? How do you face the death of childhood with such equanimity, pray tell? Because it’s just a description used in a University of Missouri-Columbia survey into drunkenness. “Mary Poppinses” are the nice drunks, who remain friendly and cooperative before they fall unconscious. 
 
 What are the others? Pas from Little House on the Prairie, who remain manly and unaffected? Colins from The Secret Garden, who turn nasty under the influence (he would, you know)? Wizards of Oz, who turn into something quite different once the veil of sobriety is ripped from them? Right categories, wrong characters. 
 
 Go on, then. About 42% of the inebriated population are “Hemingways”, who can, as the man himself claimed, “drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk”. 
 
 The rallying cry for functioning alcoholics everywhere. How do the remaining 58% divide? Well, 20% are “Nutty Professors”, introverts who become extroverts; 23% are “Mr Hydes”, who become vile; and 15% are Edwardian nannies. 
 
 Mary Poppins is actually quite a cow in the books, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment, given the more pressing issue. Which is? 
 
 That this is clearly utter rubbish. How so? 
 
 Forty years of living and drinking in Britain – that’s more than 4,000 nights out on the lash – has empirically demonstrated to me that the breakdown is more like 95% Nutty Professors, 2% Hemingways, 2% Mary Poppinses and 1% Mr Hydes successfully ruining everything for everyone. I agree that your statistical analysis accords better with local experience, but maybe things are different in America. 
 
 Also, you need to pick a nomenclatural theme once you publish your research. ALL children’s book figures, or ALL classic gothic fiction or ALL canonical US titans. Otherwise, how are we meant to take it seriously? A good point. Let’s have a drink and talk it over. 
 
 Do say: “It’s liver damage whatever you call yourself, you know?” 
 
 Don’t say: “A spoonful of sugar makes this caipirinha go down lovely!” ||||| You know when you’re out with your friends at a bar, and you’ve all had the same amount to drink, yet one friend is giggling uncontrollably, another is telling a hilarious story to a group of strangers, a third is picking a fight with the bouncer, and the last is talking to the bartender as if those four Jägerbombs never happened? You might have wondered, well, what’s up with that? 
 
 Science to the rescue. Psychology researchers from the University of Missouri at Columbia have published a study in Addiction Research & Theory attempting to bring the conventional wisdom that there are many distinct ways to be drunk to its logical, scientifically-based conclusion. Their study, which involved 374 undergraduates at a large Midwestern university, drew from literature and pop culture in order to conclude that there are four types of drinkers: the Mary Poppins, the Ernest Hemingway, the Nutty Professor and the Mr. Hyde. 
 
 The first and largest group — about 40% — was the Ernest Hemingways. Named for the writer who famously boasted that he could “drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk,” Hemingways do not exhibit any major changes in personality when they transition from sober to drunk, the study contends. 
 
 In contrast, Mary Poppins drinkers follow the “practically perfect in every way” description Poppins bestows on herself in the 1964 movie: they are already outgoing types who somehow get sweeter and happier with alcohol. 
 
 After that come the Nutty Professors, named for the chemically-altered academic with a second personality immortalized by Eddie Murphy. They, the study says, are natural introverts who shed their inhibitions with special vigor when they drink, showing a flashier and more social side. 
 
 And, lastly, there are the Mr. Hydes: the evil-twin drinkers who are, according to the study, “particularly less responsible, less intellectual, and more hostile when under the influence of alcohol.” 
 
 The study authors hope to use these categories to tailor future alcoholism interventions to particular personality types. Meanwhile, you can use them to take bets on how many beers in your Nutty Professor friend will have had enough to start flirting with that brunette by the jukebox. 
 
 Read more about the study here.
– If you can "drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk," you're an Ernest Hemingway drunk—and you're in good company. That's the finding of University of Missouri researchers who broke down the types of drunks into four distinct categories in a study published in the Addiction Research & Theory journal. Scientists surveyed 187 pairs of undergraduate "drinking buddies" from a Midwestern university about their sober and intoxicated states. The findings: the subjects were either a Hemingway, Mary Poppins, Nutty Professor, or Mr. Hyde drunk. The largest group: the Hemingways, which represented about 42% of the subjects. These subjects reported experiencing the smallest decrease in organizational and intellectual skills and are "drinkers who tend not to undergo drastic character changes or experience harms" (meaning you probably won't have to worry about getting kicked out of a bar if you're a Hemingway). Per the Guardian, about 23% could be called Mr. Hyde—or Ms. Hyde, since more than half of the subjects who fell into this category were women—meaning they became "particularly less responsible, less intellectual, and more hostile when under the influence of alcohol." One-fifth earned the honor of being labeled the Nutty Professor, meaning they were more introverted before imbibing and became much more gregarious and uninhibited afterward. The Mary Poppinses, which made up about 15% of the pool, are "particularly agreeable" after drinking—in other words, the happy, "sweet" drunks who don't cause any trouble. So what was the point of the study, other than having names to attribute to friends while bar-hopping? The researchers say it could lead to customization of alcohol intervention programs based on personality type, Time notes. (It turns out one eye color is linked to alcoholism.)