{"id":31314,"date":"2017-01-01T17:12:10","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T22:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/?p=31314"},"modified":"2017-01-03T18:34:52","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T23:34:52","slug":"3000-adjectives-for-drunkenness-makes-me-tipsy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/3000-adjectives-for-drunkenness-makes-me-tipsy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fuzzy Vine-acular: 3,000 Descriptors for Drunkenness Makes My Head Spin"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Natalie MacLean<\/p>\n

Last night’s\u00a0startling discovery: there are more adjectives for drunkenness than there are Inuit words for snow. And I\u2019m not just talking about being intoxicated or inebriated, or even blotto, blasted or bombed.<\/p>\n

There are well over 3,000 descriptors\u2014just looking at the list makes me feel tipsy. \u00a0What\u2019s more interesting is the difference between the words used for men and women, young and old, bodily and behavioural effects\u2014and how expressions vary across cultures and languages to reveal both positive and negative views.<\/p>\n

I had lots of help researching this subject from friends who came up with a bandwagon of terms. And contrary to what they suggested, simply being a wine writer of Scottish-Irish descent does not<\/em> make me an international authority.<\/p>\n

First, the cooking and baking category\u2014words that describe the effect of drink on our internal organs as though they\u2019re pot roasts (stewed, boiled, brewed, smoked, sauced, soaked, basted, boiled, fried), preserves (jarred, canned, corked, pickled, juiced, minced) or pastries (baked, pie-eyed, buttered, toasted).<\/p>\n

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Soused, for example, comes from seventeenth-century English, originally meaning \u201cto marinate,\u201d and is closely related to sozzled\u2014\u201cmade moist.\u201d So to be precise, we get sozzled before we get soused.<\/p>\n

Other adjectives observe our behavior: drunks are childish (a bag of toys) or crazy: gone, gonzo, knackered, loopy, out of it, scattered, snappered, zoned, zonkers, zombied, cockeyed, comatose or just plain stupid.<\/p>\n

(And yet to use the definition of any one of these words sounds odd, as in \u201cI\u2019m going to drink myself into a low level of intelligence tonight.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Drinking brings out our animal nature, making us drunk as a skunk, weasel-eyed, ratted, rat-arsed, zoo\u2019d, ripped as a newt, boiled as an owl, howling, hog- whimpering or roaring drunk.<\/p>\n

Those of us who drank too much at college dorm parties may also recall the extreme adjectives, even murder metaphors, of our youth\u2014and indeed we probably did kill off parts of our brains and livers.<\/p>\n

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They were generally grouped by method: sharp instrument (half-cut, ripped, let her rip, screwed), blunt instrument (hammered, smashed, whammed, slammed, stoned, ossified), poison (polluted, gassed, trashed), electrocution (wired, buzzed, zapped, blistered), hanging (tied one on, looped, strung out, twisted) and car accident (not firing on all cylinders, well-oiled, shellacked, lubricated, pumped up, totaled, mashed, wrecked).<\/p>\n

Then there was injury or death from no apparent cause (done in, ruined, obliterated, decimated, paralytic, legless, blind drunk, dead drunk).<\/p>\n

From fighting, we get thrashed, lashed, wasted and clobbered. Spifflicated\u2014\u201cgiven a thorough thrashing and overcome completely\u201d\u2014comes from the eighteenth-century English combination of stifle and suffocate.<\/p>\n

In 1818, Sir Thomas Moore wrote, \u201cAlas, alas, our ruins\u2019s fated, all done up and spifflicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019ve matured, most of us prefer to get mellow rather than mangled\u2014enjoying that drowsy sunlit windowsill feeling. The adjectives, too, are more genteel: sociable, feeling no pain, woozy, have a glow on, over-refreshed, euphoric, afflicted.<\/p>\n

Women are more euphemized than men: we\u2019re tipsy, in our cups, tiddly or whiffled\u2014as if we\u2019ve been tippling with Daisy Buchanan from The<\/em> Great Gatsby. <\/em>But real men get tight, lagered or liquored up.<\/p>\n

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Celebrities are never more than \u201ctired and emotional\u201d\u2014presumably needing rest at a rustic Betty Ford resort. But working-class adjectives sound as though we\u2019re doing home renovations or landscaping: plastered, pasted, lamped, lit, well-irrigated, hosed, ploughed.<\/p>\n

Some expressions are easily understood: wearing your wobbly boots, having a close look at the footpath, under the table, full of loud-mouth soup or predicting earthquakes. But others seem to come from another time.<\/p>\n

Three sheets to the wind is a nineteenth-century naval phrase: sheets are what landlubbers like me would call ropes and they control the sails. \u201cThree sheets to the wind\u201d means that those ropes weren\u2019t tied down but left flapping, hence \u201cto the wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be half in the bag (nearly drunk) or in the bag (fully drunk), may be either a shortened version of the breathalyzer bag or simply a bag holding (and concealing) the booze.<\/p>\n

Going on a bender referred both to the crooked way a drunk walks and the random violent acts in which he might cause. Got a jag on means drinking to excess; but a jag is also used for other types of emotional breakdowns, such as a crying jag.<\/p>\n

Drunk as blazes is a corruption of the 1860 drunk as blaziers, after the participants in a feast in honor of St. Blaize.<\/p>\n

But perhaps more revealing is to look across cultures and languages. My French-speaking friends insist that there aren\u2019t nearly as many words for drunk in their own language because in their culture, they grew with alcohol as something to be enjoyed in moderation rather than forbidden.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the French say Il est paquet\u00e9 <\/em>(literally, he\u2019s parceled up, bagged) or bourr\u00e9<\/em> (stuffed or loaded).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Si ma m\u00e8re m’avait donn\u00e9 du lait comme \u00e7a, je serais encore avec elle. <\/em>(If my mother had given me milk like this, I’d still be with her) and Il boirait la mer et les poissons<\/em> (He would drink the whole ocean, along with the fish).<\/p>\n

Another expression must be accompanied by the appropriate gesture: someone says Je suis completement<\/em> (I am full) or Plein comme un oeuf<\/em> (full like an egg), then makes a fist, brings the thumb and forefinger to his nose and makes an unscrewing motion.<\/p>\n

In Spanish, they talk about catching a hake<\/em> or a cigala<\/em> (large crayfish) in an ocean of fish. A borracho<\/em> is a drunk.<\/p>\n

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The Japanese say getting yoed<\/em> (having one too many) or chidori ashi<\/em> (drunks who walk like a bird called chidori<\/em>, which scampers right and left, never in a straight line).<\/p>\n

In Germany they say Ich bin blau<\/em> (I am blue) or Ich habe einen schwips, <\/em>which means I have a schwips, both onomatopeic (drunken speech is often bubbly) as well as related to one of the German words for hiccup.<\/p>\n

Shickered, which conveniently rhymes with liquored, is Australian slang for intoxicated. It comes from the early twentieth-century Yiddish shiker<\/em>, a drunk.<\/p>\n

And some folks use Adrian Quist, the Australian tennis champ from the 1960s, because it rhymes with I\u2019m pissed. (Which brings to mind the entire scabrous family of adjectives: stinko, shit-faced and crapulous.)<\/p>\n

Latin doesn\u2019t just give us In vino, veritas<\/em> (in wine, the truth\u2014as in a few glasses will get anyone talking freely) but also Plures crapula quam gladius<\/em> (Drunkenness kills more than the sword).<\/p>\n

In Austria, they say, \u201cEr hat zu tief ins Glas geguckt.\u201d (He looked too deeply into his glass). In Russia, \u201cLet’s have a drink, even if it\u2019s just Paulina Ivanovna.\u201d (Paulina Ivanovna is a brand of furniture polish consumed by drunks for its alcohol content\u2014others use the phrase to mean a simple drink, nothing fancy.)<\/p>\n

A friend\u2019s late grandfather used to own a pub in Ireland. According to him, his grandfather was the quintessential Irish publican: the local moneylender, church usher, political organizer and boozehound.<\/p>\n

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Every couple of months, he\u2019d hire a barkeeper for three or four days and announce that he was going on his holidays. The journey entailed him wobbling over to the other side of the bar and staying there for the duration.<\/p>\n

While on these holidays, none of the regulars would talk to him about money, business or politics. That phrase became part of the local vernacular\u2014and holidays were taken every couple of months for sixty glorious years.<\/p>\n

Another story says that in Dublin pubs, the bartender would try to calm everyone by telling them to \u201cmind their Ps and Qs\u201d\u2014P stood for pint and Q for quart. Others claim that regulars would admonish the barman with those words, to make sure that he tallied their bill correctly\u2014and didn\u2019t charge them for a quart when they only drank a pint.<\/p>\n

Still, yet another origin story says that this advice was to printers’ apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs, or the same advice to children who were learning to write.<\/p>\n

Regardless, they all ended up at the pub after a long day (well, except the children). \u00a0And apparently there used to be whistles on the tops of the beer mugs\u2014when you wanted a refill, you would blow your whistle or wet your whistle.<\/p>\n

The English language is a living thing if the number of new words to describe modern-day drunkenness is any indication. There\u2019s Merl Haggarded, after the king of mournful country-western drinking songs and Moulin Rouged from the recent musical movie about booze-soaked Bohemian Paris in 1900.<\/p>\n

The high-tech crowd gives us rendered and pixilated. Out West, they talk about being Campbelled or inKleined to have one too many, after the drinking exploits of the premiers of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, and Alberta, Ralph Klein.<\/p>\n

The range of words we use to describe excessive drinking is unmatched by those for overeating, exercising or even copulating.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s because getting loaded hits our sensory circuits like nothing else: not only are we full of alcohol, but we\u2019re also full of the loudest laughter, the biggest gestures, the tenderest sympathies, the grandest schemes and the blackest rages. (And the next morning, we\u2019re often filled with the deepest regrets.)<\/p>\n

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Yet when most of us are obliviated, we\u2019ve lost the nuances of diction and etymology to describe how we\u2019re feeling\u2014or we\u2019re in denial:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not affluenced by incohol at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Natalie MacLean Last night’s\u00a0startling discovery: there are more adjectives for drunkenness than there are Inuit words for snow. And I\u2019m not just talking about being intoxicated or inebriated, or even blotto, blasted or bombed. There are well over 3,000 descriptors\u2014just looking at the list makes me feel tipsy. \u00a0What\u2019s more interesting is the difference between the words used for men and women, young and old, bodily and behavioural effects\u2014and how expressions vary across cultures and languages to reveal both positive and negative views. I had lots of help researching this subject from friends who came up with a bandwagon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1059,1060,113,7,1215,1217,1216,378,1061,3,961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alcohol-in-wine","category-alcoholic-wine","category-best-wines","category-culture-humor","category-hangover","category-hangover-wine","category-headache-wine","category-health-and-wine","category-high-alcohol-wine","category-wine-articles","category-wine-sayings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31314"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31346,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314\/revisions\/31346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}