Sloshed, plastered and gazeboed: why Britons have 546 words for drunkenness
Name: Drunkonyms.
Age: As old as alcohol itself.
Quantity: 546.
I’m not entirely sure I know what a drunkonym is. Let me help you out. The Sámi people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia are said to have more than 300 words for snow. For example, “Åppås” means untouched winter snow, “Säásj” refers to old snow that has become loose and coarse and “Tsievve” is snow that has become so hard that not even reindeer can dig through it.
This is fascinating, but what’s your point? My point is that, just as the Sámi have hundreds of words for snow, British people have hundreds of words for “drunk”. Five-hundred and forty-six, in fact.
This sounds like an exaggeration. Fine, I’ll list them. Pissed. Sloshed. Stewed. Wrecked. Hammered. Bladdered. Plastered. Mullered. Pickled. Bevvied. Rubbered. Tanked. Cock-eyed. Zombied. Blootered. Trolleyed. Rat-arsed. Wankered. Shit-faced. Arseholed …
OK, OK, I get it. The list goes on and on and on.
What a source of national pride this is. It should be – apparently other languages don’t do this. What do you notice about the words I just told you?
They’re pretty vulgar? Well, yes. But also they all end in “ed”. British people have three things going for them: an absurd sense of humour, a peculiar form of sentence construction and a genuinely horrifying drinking culture. Combine the three and, if you add “ed” to basically any noun, everyone will be able to understand that you’re referring to intoxication.
Rubbish. Try it.
Fine. I was wallpapered out of my mind last night. Oh wow! See? It really works. Watch this: I got so oreganoed last night that I ended up vomiting on a policeman.
This is really a thing. It is. Prof Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer published a study about it in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association after spending a year in Britain. She points out that the “ed” suffix would never work in Germany, because words would lose their meaning. Meanwhile, “‘Gazeboed’ and ‘carparked’ are funny because there is no direct relation between the base word and the meaning ‘drunk’,” she says.
But not all drunk words end with “ed”. True. There’s squiffy, tipsy, merry and half cut, for example. But these are slightly more chaste descriptions, denoting moderate intoxication. Bung an “ed” on the end of a word, though, and people will know you poisoned yourself.
Fun. Actually, that’s one of the things that Sanchez-Stockhammer mentions in her study. One of the reasons that the British have so many drunkonyms could be because it allows us to discuss drinking in a lighthearted way that helps us to conceal all the terrible consequences of habitual binge-drinking. So, er, yay for us, I guess.
Do say: “Like the Sámi with snow, the British have hundreds of words for drunk.”
Don’t say: “Unlike the Sámi, all our words mean the same thing: mortally embarrassing ourselves in front of people who love us.”