I'm wondering if anyone knows the origin of the term pink elephants, which is often associated with being drunk.

There is a song in Disney's Dumbo that is about pink elephants and it is queued when Dumbo falls into a bucket of beer and gets drunk. Is this in fact the origin, or does the song just use the term for effect?

A typical feature of delirium tremens (one of the manifestations of alcoholic psychosis) is the presence of bizarre visual hallucinations, often taking the form of zoopsias (i.e. hallucinations in which the patient thinks he/she sees animals). Seeing pink elephants, though, does not seem to be particularly common – it is most probably a jocular term.

I think I confirmed my suspicion. I felt guilty about posing something that would cause other people to LUI and decided to take what Tsuwm's advice would undoubtedly be and LUI myself. M-w.com says that the term originated in 1940, which is the year that Dumbo was released, so I would say that that is indeed the origin.

Jack London wrote an autobiographical memoir entitled "John Barleycorn" (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1913) in which he said:

"There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."

This remarkably pre-dates the Dumbo movie and puts the lie to Disney's origination of this conception.

Well, that makes Merriam-Webster wrong.

Jazzoctopus sez: "Well, that makes Merriam-Webster wrong."

And the Vicar responds: I LOVE when this happens. I wonder if M-W has the prescience and the humility to monitor these pages.