Brits have invented 546 words for being drunk – no surprise there, we love making up nonsense, just ask Michael McIntyre
OOF! Feeling a bit rough today after getting completely Hemingwayed last night with the lads.
Dave was utterly brantubbed and had to be dragged off the karaoke.
Craig was no better, he was staggering about the place completely puffpastried after knocking back the shots with Alan, who ended up so manboobed he threw up over himself.
What a night, I’ve never been so Big Macced in my entire puff.
I’m sorry? What the hell am I going on about?
Am I trying to say that me and my invented associates drank too much and got . . . drunk?
Well, yes, that would be correct.
But how boring to just use one word — when 546 will do.
That’s right, we Brits apparently have five hundred and forty six different words — and counting — for having, ahem, imbibed one or two more libations than our doctor would advise.
News of our Dionysian dictionary comes courtesy of German professor Dr Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, who this week published a heavyweight academic report into our “drunkonyms”.
As she puts it: “The British enjoy talking about being drunk.
“I know of no other language where you have so many words [for something].”
Hurrah, we’re No1!
That old line about Eskimos having 50 words for snow suddenly sounds a lot less impressive.
Prof Sanchez-Stockhammer published her investigation into why we love making up words about getting p***ed (there’s another) in the Yearbook Of The German Cognitive Linguistics Association.
I appreciate your copy may not have arrived yet, so here is a smattering of those 546 terms.
Cabbaged, ginned, peloothered, befuggered, moccasined, newcastled, pifflicated, blootered, bungalowed, confuddled and fershnickered.
You may have spotted a theme here.
How we achieve much of this etymological excitement is apparently simple — we just pick a word we fancy and add “-ed” to the end, as I lazily did with the first five examples in this article.
And the more indirect that word is the better, as with our other unique contribution to the global lexicon, Cockney rhyming slang.
Just try it.
Pick a random object you have within reach and add “-ed”.
I’m currently laptopped and notebooked, which both, when uttered with a soul-draining sigh, sound passable.
Especially if you’ve had 15 pints.
Of course, the report shows, we have other terms that don’t end in –ed, many of which are also suitably oblique, such as cup-shotten, jug-bitten, kisky and rotto.
We also like to include an adverb before our fabricated phrase — “really” is predictably our favourite but good old “fing” comes in at a healthy sixth, the research reveals.
And all this is drilled into us from an early stage.
It’s nurture that enables us to understand these bonkers bon mots, reckons the prof, who notes in her paper that the first use of a word to describe being drunk was “merry” in 1382.
‘I got completely . . . ’
As she puts it: “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.”
Also, because we Brits LOVE getting, er, steampigged so much, we like to conjure up new words to detract from our unhealthy obsession.
Says Prof Sanchez-Stockhammer: “Even though excessive alcohol consumption may come with negative consequences, drunkenness is commonly discussed using a wide range of light-hearted linguistic meanings in English.”
The academic, who says she rarely gets Sanchez-Stockhammered herself, owes much of her thinking to a Brit — comic Michael McIntyre.
She mentions how the much-loved comedian was on to something when he suggested, in a routine, that all Brits could understand any word for drunk when preceded by something like: “I got completely . . . ”
I completely agree.
That’s the thing about how our language and sense of humour combine.
It’s not just what we say but how we say it.
Chris Morris, the maverick satirist behind TV shows Brasseye and The Day Today, observed this too.
His brilliant Nathan Barley sitcom about “idiot” hipsters in East London made much of our whimsical use of our language.
Painfully hip characters shouting nonsense including “totally Mexico” and “keep it foolish” made them sound ridiculous, but with their delivery it somehow made sense.
We laughed at them — but how different were they from us?
Unhealthy obsession
We love talking nonsense.
Inventing new terms is what we do.
Oxford’s Word Of The Year in 2023 was “rizz” — a shortened form of “charisma”, used mainly by kids.
Look at the Love Island glossary.
And besides, making up words was good enough for Shakespeare.
The Bard, who some even claim died after getting totally Othelloed following a two-day sesh with the poetry posse, is believed to have introduced 1,700 new words in his lifetime.
The father of many of the phrases we use today, he featured alcohol in every one of his plays, where characters got “cashiered” and “fap”.
Now we’re all William Shakespeare — me, you and, yes, even that bloke crashed out by the dartboard covered in his own urine.
We all have his way with words.
I think it’s time we started celebrating our new spoken word superiority.
Who’s up for getting completely McIntyred?