[Ads-l] why Britons have 546 words for drunkenness

[George Thompson]

This is cut from an article in The Guardian, seen this morning (Tuesday).
The original is in the form of a dialogue between the interlocutor and a
somewhat dim-witted friend.
It seems that the link in the original to the learned article is still live.

GAT

*Sloshed, plastered and gazeboed: why Britons have 546 words for
drunkenness*

***

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.

***

Pissed. Sloshed. Stewed. Wrecked. Hammered. Bladdered. Plastered. Mullered.
Pickled. Bevvied. Rubbered. Tanked. Cock-eyed. Zombied. Blootered.
Trolleyed. Rat-arsed. Wankered. Shit-faced. Arseholed …

***

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.

***

Prof Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer published a study about it in the Yearbook
of the German Cog <https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/gcla/html>nitive
Linguistics Association <https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/gcla/html> 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.


***  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.


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.--



George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then..

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)

https://heritagecollections.parliament.uk/collections/getrecord/HOP_WOA_3851

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