Recently, we’ve moved into a new level of acceptance of our “Famously Hot” identity. It’s so well known that Columbians can invoke in part, and get the message across.

As the Free Times did in this recent feature:

Famously Drunk

A Brief History of Drinking in Columbia

BY EVA MOORE

In 2011, Men’s Health magazine named Columbia the 13th drunkest city in the country.

We rank 14th among cities for DUI deaths; 18th for binge drinking. And with the University of South Carolina earning the No. 20 party school slot in the 2011 Princeton Review rankings, perhaps it’s not surprising that Columbia is famously drunk.

But it’s not clear whether Columbia is drunker than in 1873, when, according to a later report in the Temperance Recorder, there were “grogshops everywhere.”

And it’s hard to say whether Columbia is any drunker now than it was one night in December of 1922, during Prohibition, when The State newspaper reported a rash of drinking arrests. “Columbia Police Have Busy Night,” the paper trumpets: A man and woman were arrested for being “drunk and disorderly in a motorcar” on South Main Street, with the woman “almost unconscious from the effects of strong drink” and unable to give her name. A man drove off Assembly Street into a hole. Another man was arrested for “illuminating part of the town with gunfire.” Two men were arrested for “transporting small quantities of hooch.” Four more were hauled in for being drunk and disorderly. The cause of all these crimes, according to the paper, was “dynamite liquor.”…

Of course, if one is famously hot, one is likely to be famously thirsty. So there’s some logic to this. Think what you will of this latest wrinkle on our reputation, we’re at least glad to have helped provide a way to express it.