12/10/2023 0 Comments Funny words for drunkAt the other extreme, euphemisms bear witness to the desire to avoid making any direct allusion at all to the drinking situation: concerned, disguised, under the influence, tired and emotional. And the fact that the drinks are, by definition, liquid, has resulted in several more, such as soaken, wet, swilled, swash, sozzled, blotto, and liquefied. The contents of the container are also productive, as with sack sopped, groggy, lushy, malty, rummy, swizzled, skimished, plonked, and bevvied. Some of the earliest descriptive terms come from the containers used by drinkers: The fourteenth-century cupshotten is the first, but later centuries have given us such words as potshotten, jugbitten, tapshackled, flagonal, tanked, canned, potted, and bottled, as well as the more genteel in one’s cups. Another is mental state, such as being muddled (fuddled, muzzed, queer, woozy), elated (highflown, wired, pixilated), or worn down (whittled, halfshaved, rotten, crocked, the worse for wear). One fruitful vein is to find terms that characterize drunken appearance (owleyed, pieeyed, cockeyed, lumpy, blue, lit) or behaviour, especially erratic movement (slewed, bumpsy, reeling ripe, tow row, rocky, on one’s ear, zigzag, tipped, looped) or lack of any movement at all (stiff, paralytic). To describe someone as simply drunk, in drink, or in liquor is accurate but evidently uninspiring. There seems to be a universal trend to avoid stating the obvious. But it’s rare to find a word that stays in one country for long, and these days online slang dictionaries have largely broken down geographical boundaries. Local regional variations are sometimes apparent, such as from Scotland (fou, strut, swash, blootered, swacked), England (bottled, pissed, ratarsed), and Australia (blue, rotten, shickery, plonked, on one’s ear) and since the eighteenth century most new words in this semantic field have started out in the United States. There are very few formal terms in the list, apart from a few expressions fostered by the law (intoxicated, over the limit), and some early scholarly words (inebriate(d), temulent, ebrious). The list below shows only the occasional indication of a class preference (such as genteel whiffled vs thieves' cant suckey), and occupational origins are seen only in some nautical expressions (three sheets, oversparred, up the pole, tin hat, honkers), though the etymology is not always definite. Terms for being drunk can’t usually be explained by referring to such variables as age, gender, social class, occupation, or regional background. The history of drinking vocabulary is an exercise in semantics rather than sociolinguistics. The adjectives for being drunk provide one of the longest lists in the thesaurus. But nothing in Old English vocabulary anticipates the extraordinary growth of alcoholic lexicon over the next thousand years. One could be oferdrunken ("overdrunk") or indruncen ("saturated with drink"), symbelgal ("wanton with drink-feasting") or symbel wlonc ("elated with drink-feasting"), or simply dryncwerig ("drink-weary"). But already the Anglo-Saxons had begun to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary. In the beginning, one was simply drunken or fordrunken ("very drunk").
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