Mine is "swacked." This writer annoys me by making "drank" the past participle. Ugh! -- Belle
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December 31, 2008, 10:00 pm
Besotted �?Etymologically, That Is
By Iain Gately
I cleared my hangover on Boxing Day by going for a surf at Espasante, near my home in Galicia, northern Spain. As soon as I started to paddle out, a close-out set came in, every wave of which landed on my head, so that by the time I’d got to the break I was knackered, breathless, and freezing. I fell off a few waves then rode in to shore an hour later, mission accomplished �?my head was clear.
A fisherman �?with Anton, the town pig by his side �?had been watching me and he asked, “What happened to you out there?�?I tried to explain, but my Spanish was inadequate. The only way I could say I’d drank too much the day before was “estuve borracho�?but borracho wasn’t the word I wanted. To me it implies a bestial, slobbering sort of drunkenness, which wasn’t quite how it had seemed when I was celebrating Yuletide with family and friends.
We’d feasted, played games with the children, danced, decorated each other with fluorescent paint, and drank: beer and Cava for the race down the stream, Albarino with the salmon, Priorat with the suckling pig, more Cava for musical chairs, Port with the Stilton and roasted chestnuts, a cleansing ale during the treasure hunt, brandy with the Christmas pudding, then back to wine and anything else that was open for dancing.
When I fell into bed with my partner I was happy: inebriated yes, wasted, no. Squiffy rather than sloshed, trashed or flayed. But how do you say squiffy in Spanish?
As far as I’m aware, English has the richest vocabulary of any language when it comes to describing the effects of alcohol upon human behavior. I think that that’s because the British have been constant and heavy drinkers for most of their history. From the Anglo-Saxon invasions to the Industrial Revolution, they’ve been getting beodrunken, foxed, tipsy, pie-eyed and woozey. Indeed the English have developed an entire lexicon to express different nuances of the same condition.
The habit has traveled with the language: in America, in particular, English speakers have sought to expand the range of euphemisms for inebriation. In January 1736, Benjamin Franklin published “a new Piece, lately communicated to me, entitled the DRINKERS DICTIONARY�?in the Philadelphia Gazette, which offered 228 “distant round-about phrases,�?culled from the taverns of the town, which were understood “to signify plainly that A MAN IS DRUNK.�?My favorites include the following:
“He sees the Bears�?
“He’s got his Top Gallant Sails out�?
“He’s kiss’d black Betty�?
“He’s Eat a Toad & half for Breakfast�?
“Been too free with Sir Richard�?
“Nimptopsical�?
“Trammel’d�?
The Drinkers�?Dictionary evokes the age and the place in which it was collated. Probably half of its entries are seamen’s slang �?and reflect the importance of maritime commerce to Philadelphia at the time. A good many others are rustic and feature such colonial exotica as Indians, bears, and kibb’ed heels. The influence of the Bible is also evident �?even drunks knew their way around the Good Book in those days.
Just under two centuries later, the Dictionary was revisited by Edmund Wilson in his “Lexicon of Prohibition.�?It too is something of a time capsule, with a number of terms and phrases which sing of the Jazz Age, including:
“Zozzled�?
“to have the whoops and jingles�?
“to burn with a low blue flame�?
However, the Lexicon listed a mere 105 expressions for drunkenness �?fewer than half of the terms that appear in its 18th century equivalent. Wilson attributed the decline to changes in drinking patterns brought on by prohibition: “It is interesting to note that one hears nowadays less often of people going on sprees, toots, tears, jags, bats, brannigans or benders. All these terms suggest, not merely drunkenness, but also an exceptional occurrence, a breaking away by the drinker from the conditions of his normal life. It is possible that their partial disappearance is mainly to be accounted for by the fact that this kind of fierce and protracted drinking has now become universal, an accepted feature of social life instead of a disreputable escapade.�?He did, however, believe that terms used to describe social drinking had become more nuanced during the Noble Experiment.
I wonder how long the list of words and phrases for being under the influence would be today? Some of the old terms, such as “stoned,�?coined in Jacobean England to denote lustful drunkenness, are now applied to the discombobulation brought on by different drugs than alcohol. Others vanished with the days of sail. I ran through a good two dozen in my head at Espasante when I was searching for a word that went into Spanish easily. Merry? Caned? Loaded? Stocious?
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