Jennifer Ouellette writes for Ars Technica about a productive element of English vocabulary:
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.
So the sheer number of drunkonyms has been increasing, with BBC culture reporter Susie Dent estimating in 2017 that there are some 3,000 English slang synonyms for being drunk, including “ramsquaddled,” “obfusticated,” “tight as a tick,” and my personal favorite, “been too free with Sir Richard.” Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig offer a few caveats, noting that the latter number is likely inflated (much like the number of words for “snow” in Eskimo languages). Also, most drunkonyms are not frequently used and tend to fall out of use quickly rather than taking root in the broader cultural consciousness.
For their study, Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig scoured various sources to compile their own working list of drunkonyms, excluding any with “drunk” as a base (e.g., “martin-drunk”) and using Excel to delete any repeated terms. They ended up with the 546 drunkonyms listed in their appendix.
Surprisingly, there were Urban Dictionary entries for McIntyre’s terms “gazeboed” (2008), and “carparked,” and “pyjama-ed” (2009). McIntyre first recorded this particular bit in October 2009 for a DVD, suggesting that “these terms were already in use either shortly before or around the time of McIntyre’s tour”—perhaps inspired by the comedian’s earlier standup performances as he worked out the material before producing a DVD for posterity. That said, the October 2009 audience responded with a lot of laughter and applause, so the drunkonyms were at least unfamiliar to many in attendance that night.
(I’m not sure that last conclusion follows; why do laughter and applause imply unfamiliarity?) More at the posted article, including links; unsurprisingly, Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig concluded that “There is ample potential for future studies.” Thanks, Y!
Dipsonym would be more felicitous, but no one asks me.
Dipshonym would be even better.
Unteetotlered, or in Alcoholics Anonymous jargon, “gone out”.
As I might have mentioned before, one of my favourite expressions using “blind” is “blind as a welder’s dog” (meaning, of course, “drunk as a skunk” or “pissed as a parrot”, only more so).
Пьян как фортепьян ‘Drunk as a piano.’
If he’d used “plastered”, “sloshed” or “destroyed”, the reaction would have been “yeah, so what?” – known examples don’t demonstrate that the method is productive; applying it to new examples and finding that they work does.
Viennese dialect simply distinguishes the three stages: an-, zu-, niedergesoffen – “notably affected”, “filled to the brim”, “under the table”. The first (!) includes “out of your fucking mind”.
@David M
Could be a legacy of the classically overeducated Viennese.
I’m thinking of the Latin: “first cup sweet as honey… ter cave frater”.
One endearing aspect of the traditional German drinking culture is the drinking songs. In the Anglosphere, drinking songs have just about gone extinct.
Here in Australia, we seem to have inherited an Anglo-Irish drinking culture where the aim is not necessarily to have a good time with friends chatting and eating while having a drink. Instead the aim is to get plastered as quickly as possible. The saving grace are the younger generations (yes the Millennials are doing something well for a change) who are not that much into alcohol.
A mere three stages in Vienna? The noted American scholar of the subject Dan Jenkins (1928-2019) devised a ten-stage scale, first promulgated in his 1981 novel _Baja Oklahoma_.* I read that book shortly after it came out and had the ten stages committed to memory for a while, but now in my old age I need to google and then cut and paste. The ten stages are of course scientifically-descriptive and not merely slangy or jocular. In order of progressive intoxication they are:
1. Witty and Charming
2. Rich and Powerful
3. Benevolent
4. Clairvoyant
5. Fuck Dinner
6. Patriotic
7. Crank up the Enola Gay
8. Witty and Charming, Part II
9. Invisible
10. Bulletproof
*In case it’s not obvious to non-Americans, “Baja Oklahoma” is a synonym for Texas. Possibly jocular, depending on who you ask.
Separately, I don’t mean to knock Chemnitz Tech (Go NAMEOFMASCOTGOESHERE’s!), but I’m not sure I understand the recent German academic landscape enough to grok how why and when Sprachwissenschaft scholarship became part of the former Hochschule für Maschinenbau Karl-Marx-Stadt. And now I’m idly curious about the post-1989 fate of the former faculty of that Hochschule’s Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. One hopes they were all compassionately offered retraining to pursue exciting new careers as salt-mine laborers rather than stuck elsewhere in some corner of an academic enterprise where it was hoped no one would be paying too close attention, but maybe that’s over-optimistic.
an Anglo-Irish drinking culture
There is (or once was) a very definite difference between Scotland and England in this (with Scotland going more for the pharmaceutical/toxicological, England more for the social aspects.)
In these Latter Days of the Law, things may be different. I haven’t been out on a spree in Scotland for quite a while. (It might be medically inadvisable at my time of life, anyway.)
I recall reading somewhere that the per capita consumption of alcohol in Ireland is much the same as in England; however, Ireland has a significantly higher proportion of total abstainers, so the remainder have to pick up the slack.
Visiting the Rijksmuseum a couple of years ago, I noticed a considerable number of paintings by less well known (but highly competent) Dutch painters, depicting a variety of jolly scenes, with titles such as The Merry Baker, The Merry Family, The Merry Cobbler’s Wife’s second cousin once-removed and so on. It took a while to dawn on me that ‘merry’ clearly meant shloshed.
The “tipsy” sense of “merry” has led to “Merry Christmas” being largely replaced in Ireland by “Happy Christmas”. (“Happy Holidays” not so much, for several reasons.) The hitherto “Happy” New Year chain-shifts to “Peaceful” and/or “Prosperous”.
The percentage of teetotallers has shrunk as the Pioneers are in secular decline like all other lay Catholic groups. Irish drinking culture has changed continually over the last 50 years, but I guess something similar is true in most Western countries.
ten stages
one of my favorite yiddish drinking songs (if it’s been recorded, nobody told the internet) lays out a somewhat similar progression, glass by glass and rhyme by rhyme:
happy
royal
bountiful / redistributionary
festival-founding / commemorative
at which point “az es iz a yontef, darf men trinkn nokh / blaybt bam shenker alts vos kh’hob fardint di gantse vokh” (since it’s a holiday, we must drink again / everything i earned the whole week will stay with the tavernkeeper).
If he’d used “plastered”, “sloshed” or “destroyed”, the reaction would have been “yeah, so what?” – known examples don’t demonstrate that the method is productive; applying it to new examples and finding that they work does.
All very logical, but have you ever been to a comedy show? I would say “laughter and applause” is the basic response to whatever the comedian says, unless of course the comedian isn’t any good, in which case demonstrating that a method is productive will do no good. In any case, of course he wouldn’t use “plastered” or “sloshed,” but a newly popular synonym that most of them had only recently heard would produce the same laughter and applause. “Hey, yeah, I know that one!”
Re the supposedly toxicological culture of Scotland: I have spent modest amounts of time over the course of my life in very poor and supposedly scary neighborhoods of various major and dysfunctional US cities, but I have never in my life seen as high a concentration in a single location of completely incapacitated addicts as I saw late one night (1994?) in and around the train station in Inverness. The birthplace, I should note, of one of my own great-great-grandfathers. Who violated local legal norms at the age of 17 or thereabouts by skipping out on the apothecary to whom he was apprenticed half-way through the agreed term of years in order to jump on a ship and pursue his non-pharmaceutical fortune in New York.
I used to have a South African registrar who was completely unfazed by the violent crime rates of his home country, who told me that he had never been so concerned for his personal safety as he was on a Saturday night in Glasgow.
Makes yer proud …
[Actually, a serious problem in Scotland, and not only with alcohol.]
… a South African registrar who was completely unfazed …
On this intelligence, remind me never to venture forth in Glasgow on Saturday night without a paramilitary escort. I’ve twice done time in Joburg. Wandering alone through the grimmest streets of Hillbrow (in 2000) is something I’d not repeat. Reminded me of Pakbeng (Laos) in 1999: an overnight stop on a boat trip down to Luang Prabang. 13-year-olds emerged from the shadows, purveying handfuls of hashish. Through a front door one spied some sinister figure with a glint in his eye, meditatively cleaning a rifle. People spoke of bodies seen floating down the Mekong. Uh huh …
“notably affected”
I’ll have to start using that.
Could be a legacy of the classically overeducated Viennese.
Those are not the people who speak Viennese dialect. At least in Austria the stereotypical Viennese is an unflappable member of the working class, as exemplified by Mundl Sackbauer.
Foreigners who move to Austria are often unprepared for the level of dipsomania in the country. Parents happily drink wine at school events. You can’t seem to show up at a work conference or public lecture without someone handing you a glass of Prosecco. The average daily consumption of alcohol is I believe second highest in Europe after the Czechs. But interestingly there is very little disturbing/violent public drunkenness compared to the UK, Poland, Russia or Japan (to name other countries where I have lived). Austrians seem to be „good“ drunks for the most part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_and_emotional
a ten-stage scale
The med-school mnemonic stages are four: dizzy and delightful, drunk and disorderly, dead drunk, and danger of death
I recall one time when I was in Casualty (ER to you Americans) getting the blood alcohol level result of a patient who had been brought in comatose, and being asked by a medical student “What is the normal range?”
The journalistic convention for describing a politician’s drunken interview is “rambling.”
Terms for stages of drunkenness were previously scattered into the thread here.
(And if Hat wants to fix the question marks in my own comment there to the correct numbers of shot glasses, that would be nice.)
Done!
(Let no one say I am not a benevolent dictator.)
(Er, I mean host.)
@Noetica.
“Drugs: everyone’s selling in Pakbeng, and they happily double their profits by scamming you. After having sold you drugs, someone will appear with a police badge, and ask for a hefty bribe in exchange for not taking you in.
[….]
“Stay safe
“Pakbeng is in the Golden Triangle, and in the midst of one of the world’s drugs production areas. From the moment you set your foot in Pakbeng, you will be offered weed, opium, cocaine and amphetamines. The latter usually Burmese in origin. If you are stupid enough to buy anything, a common scam is to be approached soon after by someone with a fake police badge, who apparently will turn you in to the police if you don’t pay, usually, US$20-50. It cannot be said often enough; when in Asia, stay away from drugs” (https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Pakbeng).
I’d not come across wikivoyage.org.
Naturally looked up northern Ghana: very little of anything, and most of that wrong.
They seem to have positively gone out of their way to provide misinformation on Burkina Faso, too, though unfortunately their general advice to stay the hell away is probably all too valid at present.
I’ve never heard anyone perform one live.
Yeah, that. Vienna is where the beer region and the wine region overlap (both for drinking and for production), and at the very least elsewhere in the wine region there are Spiegeltrinker who constantly maintain a minimum nonzero blood-alcohol level. (As opposed to Rauschtrinker who get smashed at regular intervals.) That’s part of the reason why it isn’t necessary to distinguish more than three stages.
Another is that the Viennese are already witty and charming when, or if, sober. (Or at least they tend to think so.) And patriotism is not available.
Oh, interesting. The phenomenon of binge-drinking throughout the West in the last 2 or 3 decades is said to have come from England and to be worst there.
Are university sportsball teams a thing anywhere outside the US? They don’t exist anywhere in Europe.
True.
The European mainland never had temperance movements, at least not since the late 19th century or so. Abstinence for Islamic reasons is obviously on the rise, and so is abstinence that people get away with because society no longer deems it necessary to enforce conformity in this regard. (*raises hand* Alcohol stinks. I see no reason to drink it.)
If your universities had sportsball teams, that would likely have given rise to more traditional student songs which, if not drinking songs sensu stricto, are generally compatible with use as drinking songs.
Perhaps not unrelatedly, that reminds me that whatever the other deficiencies of modern “Anglo-Irish” culture might be when it comes to drinking songs, I have been told that they are definitely a thing among the rugby-playing subset of that culture.
Separately, I see that I had previously cited the theoretical framework of Jenkins (1981) in the prior thread that Brett mentioned. Although in that case I simply provided a link rather than cutting-and-pasting the full text of the ten stages.
The fine traditions of the Rijksmuseum’s merry paintings are alive and well in UK press photos
New Year’s Eve in Manchester
Black Eye Friday in Swansea
One endearing aspect of the traditional German drinking culture is the drinking songs.
I’ve never heard anyone perform one live.
Me neither, although I had my share of beery evenings with fellow Germans over the years. But I also never attended mass events like Schützenfeste or Ballermann parties; my impression is that a critical mass and some animation is needed to make us Germans sing with our alcohol intake.
Are university sportsball teams a thing anywhere outside the US? They don’t exist anywhere in Europe.
Oxford University A.F.C. won the FA Cup in 1874, and reached three other finals, most recently in 1880.
(Though AFAIK Europe – or UK, at least – doesn’t have the tradition of naming the university sportsball team the University Mascots, as opposed to University Sportsball Club.)
Unimaginative team names are practically universal in soccer. The closest thing to an exception is the communist tradition of combining (but not altogether replacing) a place name with something ideologically appropriate (“Locomotive”, “Dynamo”, “Miner”, “Spartacus”, “Red Star”, “Partisan”). Outside that tradition, the name of the main sponsor is sometimes included.
Unimaginative team names are practically universal in soccer.
UK Rugby (Union) has ‘Harlequins’, ‘Barbarians’ (which is now an international franchise), ‘Wasps’ (RIP?).
NZ/Aus/South Africa Rugby Union gave (or rather the TV sponsors gave) possibly-imaginative names to the elite division. For example Wellington ‘Hurricanes’ named for NZ’s windiest city. I find the names rather too cutesy, but not all franchises’ boundaries align neatly to a city or Province.
The best soccer team name is the Hamilton Academicals, obvs.
I suppose Sheffield Wednesday is second.
Unimaginative team names are practically universal in soccer.
UK soccer team names that include apparent nicknames previously on LH.
AFAICT there’s been no relevant changes since 2019 in England; in Scotland we’re down one Rovers and changed one Rangers (Berwick down, Cove up), plus the Kelty Hearts which apparently do play in a place called Kelty. Wales had added a whole new league tier and I’ll have to check how things work there.
(I apparently never mentioned Sport & Leisure Swifts, then Northern Ireland 3rd tier, which had since renamed themselves to Belfast Celtic. I guess that’s because “Sport & Leisure” isn’t a place… There are also Harland & Wolff Welders.)
In contrast, European teams in US sports have borrowed the US tradition, complete with US-appropriate mascots, resulting in teams with names like Helsinki Wolverines and Solingen Alligators. (Both are actual clubs, though in different sports.)
Wales had added a whole new league tier and I’ll have to check how things work there.
Cefn Druids are now entirely out, but the southern second tier league does include Baglan Dragons and Abertillery Bluebirds.
(I originally had a comment that the Baglan Dragons logo has a boar instead of a dragon. In fact the dragon is also there; it’s just so tiny it’s hard to notice.)
I’ve realized while writing this that Quidditch teams do apparently tend to have US-style place-and-mascot names (such as “Wimbourne Wasps”). I guess that’s fitting for a setting with a school that has students instead of pupils…
In Ireland, “Celtic” is always pronounced with /k/, except in the names of soccer teams, which have /s/ in honour of the Glasgow team of that ilk, whose /s/ is despite having been founded by an Irish priest who said it with /k/.
Gaelic Athletic Association clubs are often named after Irish patriots. Several are called Kickhams, after Charles Kickham, with a hint of a pun thrown in (or kicked in).
Not wanting to be second best, some Facebook group started collecting Danish drunkonyms and quickly passed the 900 mark. This was on the radio, so no source.
This reminds me of a link of potential Hattic interest concerning sportsball team names that I’d been meaning to email hat. So instead I’ll just stick it here (feel free to make it its own thread if interested, I suppose). Last summer I attended a minor league baseball game in which it turned out that the home team (the Rochester Red Wings) were on that particular occasion playing, with different uniforms etc. to match, under their alternative Spanish name of Los Cocos Locos de Rochester. Which led me to discover that this is now a widespread phenomenon, with quite a lot (maybe the majority?) of U.S. minor-league baseball teams having alternative Spanish names that typically (although not invariably) are in no sense a translation or calque of the English name. You can skim this supposedly comprehensive list for particularly striking or amusing examples. https://www.milb.com/fans/copa
Interesting! I probably wouldn’t have made a post of it, so it’s good you linked it here.
In hat’s own neck of the woods, I suppose loyalties might be divided between the Wepas de Worcester and the Chivos de Hartford, assuming the appeal of the Fenomenos Enmascarados del Valle de Hudson does not extend that far east.
No; as the URL already says, it’s Hamilton Academical, no article, no plural.
It’s definitely the best soccer team name, though.
There’s a semi-professional English team called Hashtag United, based in Essex.
#U! And I learn that “In 2022–23 Hashtag won 21 league matches in a row, going on to win the North Division title and earning promotion to the Isthmian League’s Premier Division.”
it’s Hamilton Academical, no article, no plural
That’s the name of the team, sure, but each individual player is an Academical, so collectively they are a group of Academicals, aka Accies (as I learn from the wp page)
That’s what I get for only mousing over the link and not clicking on it…
…no, actually; the article only knows “Hamilton Academical F. C.”, “Hamilton Accies” and “Accies”. The logically intermediate forms don’t surface in the article or in the Wikimedia Commons category.
Recently, Dr MHFC Jekyll turned out to be Munter Hunters FC Hyde