Drink - Victoria Moore feels a little langered
Published 17 June 2002
There are more words to describe the state of inebriation than anything else
Ladies get tiddly and tipsy. Gentlemen get tight. Celebrities who've been on the ale are, in euphemistic tabloid-speak, "tired and emotional". Lads plan to get beered up (or lagered up) and later come home bollocksed, wankered, pissed - and that's the polite half of it. Everyone else gets whammed, slammed, smashed, mashed, trashed, blind drunk, roaring . . . I could go on.
There are hundreds of slang words to describe the state of inebriation, perhaps more than there are for anything else. Mostly, it's easy to see where they come from. Pie-eyed, for example, indicates being so intoxicated that your eyes are popping. Jarred and canned both refer to the act of drinking, while a great deal of vocabulary is mobilised to depict the sorry physical wreckage of anyone who's seen the bottom of too many bottles of wine. I give you comatose, paralytic, legless and (naturally) wrecked itself, to name but a few.
Then there are the words (pickled, stewed) that remind us what alcohol may well be doing to our internal organs. An unexpected member of this set is soused. Because it sounds like doused, it is easy to think that it's part of the group of words that really just mean full of drink - tanked up, sauced, loaded. Actually, it is not. In Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, published in 1677, appears the line: "Go, dear Rogue, and succeed; and I'll invite thee, ere it be long, to more souz'd Venison." Soused means steeped in pickle - and thus also steeped in alcohol.
Many of my all-time favourites are American in origin - hog-whimpering is a marvellously pitiful phrase. An example from the 20th century is spifflicated, an older meaning of the word being "to thrash, beat or overcome completely", according to the Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, edited by Jonathon Green. In fact, fighting talk perhaps forms another category, a set that overlaps with the "wrecked" group, whether it's the drink that's beaten you or turned you into an aggressor. Take fighting the floor, thrashed, lashed, and also panelled - a particular favourite of mine. Panel is newish slang meaning to beat up.
One seemingly modern British expression has its roots in centuries-old slang. Since the 16th century, we have been mocking the poor rat. Similes then in common usage described people being as poor, as rank, as weak or as drunk as a rat - and from this last, we ended up with "ratted" as well as "rat-arsed".
The Irish have stocious, which is how a thickly speaking drunk might pronounce "atrocious". They also have langered and langerated. Where does this come from? Well, apparently, langer also means penis - probably a corruption of "long one" - so we're back to boys'-night-out vocabulary again.
The best words conceal stories. When asked why she reserved the word Baltic for people who were really, really drunk, a friend's Scottish grandmother explained that it was a reflection on the activities of seafaring men from the Moray Firth, who drank to excess in the overseas ports - and sometimes on the boats - while on fishing trips in the Baltic Sea.
It is a measure of the robustness of our drinking culture that we invent new synonyms all the time. Trolleyed is a Nineties word. My slang dictionary relates it to the phrase "off one's trolley", but how can we be sure? Couldn't it just as likely come from students on nights out, who (when they're not stealing souvenir traffic cones and road signs) always seem to end up racing around in a supermarket trolley? Or from supermarket trolleys, which are as cranky to steer as someone who's had a few? Or could it be another variation on "f***ed", from the rhyming slang "trolley and truck"?
Finally, two more favourites. Pixilated. And a French one: bete, which means, literally, beasted.
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