Tight = drunk

[Jonathan Lighter]

To follow your train of thought to the next platform: perhaps for the 1868 writer, "tipsy" retained more of its primitive meaning ("unsteady in gait from drinking") than it does for many of us today.  And perhaps Mr. Cutbill is a teetotaler who regards anyone with alcohol on his breath as "drunk."

  JL
Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Tight = drunk
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At 12:48 PM -0700 5/1/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>"Tight" basically means "drunk," not "tipsy." "A little tight,"
>which seems to be throwing people off, means "a little drunk." "Kind
>of tight" means "kind of drunk." "Tight as a tick," "...a drum,"
>"...Dick's hat band," etc., mean "very drunk," not "very tipsy."
>
> If I say, "X came in tight," the degree of X's drunkenness goes
>unstated, but X is indeed "drunk."
>
> JL

Maybe so now (the dictionaries don't always make it clear that
"tight" is stronger than "tipsy", but my intuitions go your way), but
that makes the Farmer and Henley cite, repeated here, all the more
remarkable--

1868. Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly.
'No sir, not a bit tipsy', said Harding, interpreting his glance.
'Not even what Mr Cutbill would call tight!'

Clearly there's a scale presupposed here on which "tipsy" outranks
"tight", at least for Harding and Mr. Cutbill: the referent here is
not even tight, let alone tipsy. So perhaps there has been a
sesquicentennial shift resulting in the topping up of "tight", the
watering down of "tipsy", or both.

LH

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