The lads from Edgar Wright's 2013 sci-fi comedy
World's End
know when to start drinking and get "totally and utterly carparked." (credit: Universal Pictures)
British comedian Michael McIntyre
has a standard bit
in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include "wellied," "trousered," and "ratarsed," to name a few. McIntyre's bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called "drunkonym," bolstered by a few handy examples: "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked."
It's a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre's claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean "being in a state of high inebriation." Given their prevalence, "It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective," the authors wrote in their
new paper
published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk," drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.
There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: "merry," meaning "boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy." Another OED entry from 1630 lists "blinde" (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737
Drinker's Dictionary
, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for "drunk" listed in that year's edition of the
Dictionary of American Slang
. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine
noted 900 terms
used as drunkonyms.