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I've often wondered why we use such seemingly random, yet colorful, terms to describe a state of drunkenness.  The list of words for drunkenness goes on and on and on:

stoned; tipsy; bashed; befuddled; buzzed; crocked; flushed; flying; fuddled; glazed; high; inebriate; inebriated; laced; lit; muddled; plastered; potted; sloshed; stewed; tanked; totaled; wasted; boozed up; feeling no pain; groggy; juiced; liquored up; seeing double; three sheets to the wind; tight; under the influence; under-the-table

(source)

And there are so many others, such as pickled and soused and bombed and high as a kite, which make immediate and obvious sense — to an English speaker.

Lately, I've been seeing official illuminated signs by the roadside that say "BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING", which I take to be directed at people who are high on drugs or the response of law enforcement officers to people who are obviously in an alcoholic stupor and say to the police, "I'm fine, just a little bit buzzed."

When I see drivers going 90+ miles an hour weaving left and right across 2, 3, and 4 lanes of traffic, I know for sure that they are out of their mind.

Once, going with a friend to his home outside of New Haven, we encountered a driver who was slouched down in his seat so far that you couldn't really see him as he sped by so fast on an entrance ramp that he made us feel we were standing still, knocking off our rearview mirror as he squeezed by, and then repeated the same idiotic stunt with several other cars before exploding like a bullet and disappearing down the highway.

Whatever you call such homicidal DUI behavior, there's always room for one more descriptor.  Now we have a scientific study that convincingly accounts for the plethora of such terms in English.

The weekend edition (Samstag/Sonntag  24./25. Februar 2024) of the Süddeutsche Zeitung has an editorial on the front page.

Im Wortrausch [In a Frenzy of Words]

Linguists find more then 500 synonyms in the English language for "drunk". And they found out why more are to be expected.

Here's the press release (2/19/24) of the Chemnitz University of Technology:

“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” OR: Can you really use any English word to mean ‘drunk’?

Linguistic study by Chemnitz University of Technology and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig investigates over 500 English synonyms for “drunk”

—–

The English language is famous for the large number of words that express the idea of being drunk in a humorous way – so-called drunkonyms like “pissed”, “hammered” or “wasted”. British comedian Michael McIntyre even argues in a comedy routine that posh people can use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, e.g. “I was utterly gazeboed” or “I’m gonna get totally carparked”. Is this possibly even true? And how can people understand new drunkonyms then?

Two German linguists, Prof. Dr. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Chemnitz University of Technology) and Prof. Dr. Peter Uhrig (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg & ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig), took Michael McIntyre’s claim seriously and tested it in a linguistic study. “We were curious to find out if the synonyms of “drunk” are used in similar contexts,” explains Sanchez-Stockhammer. If that were the case, new word formations might inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ automatically from the context.

The study was recently published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. “We found that “drunk” mainly occurs in the combinations “too/so/very drunk”, but unexpectedly not with the kinds of adverb used by Michael McIntyre,” explains Uhrig. By contrast, the drunkonyms ending in ‑ed (e.g. “blasted” and “loaded”) preferably occur with the expected intensifiers “completely” or “totally” (e.g. “completely loaded”).

As expected, the combination of “be” + intensifying adverb + word ending in -ed is commonly used to refer to drunkenness, but not often enough to explain how language users understand new drunkonyms. Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig therefore provide an additional explanation: by the time English native speakers reach adulthood, they have most likely experienced so many different words ending in -ed meaning ‘drunk’ that it allows them to interpret words with unknown meaning ending in -ed (e.g. “pyjamaed”) as ‘drunk’ in many contexts. The appendix of the paper alone contains a list of 546 English synonyms for “drunk” compiled from various sources.

Even though excessive alcohol consumption may come with negative consequences, drunkenness is commonly discussed using a wide range of light-hearted linguistic means in English. Sanchez-Stockhammer observes: “The humorous effect of drunkonyms is often achieved through their indirectness”. What renders McIntyre’s examples “gazeboed” or “carparked” funny is that there is no obvious relation between the base (e.g. “gazebo”) and the meaning ‘drunk’. Indirectness is also present in other types of playful language, like Cockney rhyming slang, which provides the model for English drunkonyms like “Brahms” or “Schindler’s” (short for “Brahms and Liszt” and “Schindler’s list”, both of which rhyme with the target word “pissed”). “The English language also expresses drunkenness indirectly by shortening phrases like “blind drunk” and “nicely drunk” to the corresponding drunkonyms “blind” and “nicely”. All this suggests that drunkonyms fit in well with English linguistic and humorous traditions”, says Sanchez-Stockhammer.

Here is the scientific paper:

“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness

By Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Peter Uhrig, from the journal Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association; published by De Gruyter Mouton February 19, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2023-0007

Abstract

The English language is famous for its large number of drunkonyms, i.e. words that can be used to refer to the state of drunkenness – from blind and hammered to pissed, smashed and wasted. Various lists of words have been compiled in the past (e.g. Levine 1981). However, most of the terms seem to be relatively infrequent, and they also appear to fall out of use relatively quickly. In view of Michael McIntyre’s (2009) claim that it is possible to use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, this contribution therefore approaches the issue from a constructionist perspective. In a corpus-based study, we tested whether it is possible to model the expression of drunkenness in English as a more or less schematic (set of) construction(s). Our study shows that while corpus evidence for truly creative uses is scarce, we can nonetheless identify constructional and collostructional properties shared by certain patterns that are used to express drunkenness in English. For instance, the pattern be/get + ADV + drunkonym is strongly associated with premodifying (and often strongly intensifying) adverbs such as completely, totally and absolutely. A manual analysis of a large wordlist of English drunkonyms reveals further interesting patterns that can be modelled constructionally.

I find this study quite compelling.  It is also amusing, especially the Appendix of hundreds of words expressing the state of drunkenness.  Many of them are picturesque and downright funny.  English-speaking people certainly have a rich, humorous imagination when it comes to expressing the state of inebriation.  They have far more words for it than the xxxx do for snow.  Ahem!

 

Selected readings

• "Drunkenness at the LSA" (1/11/10)
• "Another 'words for X' competition" (1/1/09)

[Thanks to Klaus Nuber]

March 9, 2024 @ 10:55 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Morphology, Vocabulary

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