by Dish Staff
Planning to get blotto, schnockered or plonked this Labor Day weekend? David Crystal reflects on assembling an “almost complete list of every word we’ve ever used to mean ‘drunk'”:
Being drunk cuts across barriers. The list … 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. 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). 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. 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.
Why has this field developed to the extent that writers regularly make a special collection of these words?
We see it early on in John Ray’s collection of proverbs (1678) or Benjamin Franklin’s Drinker’s Dictionary (1737), and artful classifications of degrees of drunkenness antedate these (see foxdrunk, 1592). It’s tempting to think that the linguistic innovation is a direct result of the uninhibited behaviour which follows a bout of drinking. Certainly there are some highly idiosyncratic (and often inexplicable) coinages in the list, such as pepst, pottical, fap, paid, muckibus, stocious,and schnockered. Many words are represented by just a single citation. And several seem to be motivated by the sound of the word as much as by any meaning it might have: jingled, whift, whiffled, squiffy, whittled, spiflicated, zonked.
The Dish 