The lads from Edgar Wright’s 2013 sci-fi comedy World’s Finish know when to begin ingesting and get “completely and completely carparked.” (credit score: Common Footage)
British comic Michael McIntyre has a normal bit in his standup routines regarding the many (many!) slang phrases posh British folks use to explain being drunk. These embrace “wellied,” “trousered,” and “ratarsed,” to call a couple of. McIntyre’s bit rests on his assertion that just about any English phrase could be modified right into a so-called “drunkonym,” bolstered by a couple of helpful examples: “I used to be completely gazeboed,” or “I’m going to get completely and completely carparked.”
It is a intelligent riff that sparked the curiosity of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz College of Expertise and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg determined to attract on their experience to check McIntyre’s declare that any phrase within the English language may very well be modified to imply “being in a state of excessive inebriation.” Given their prevalence, “It’s extremely shocking that drunkonyms are nonetheless under-researched from a linguistic perspective,” the authors wrote of their new paper revealed within the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Affiliation. Bonus: the authors included an intensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for “drunk,” drawn from varied sources, which makes for entertaining studying.
There’s a lengthy custom of arising with colourful expressions for drunkenness within the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary itemizing a utilization as early as 1382: “merry,” which means “boisterous or cheerful as a result of alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy.” One other OED entry from 1630 lists “blinde” (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin received into the act together with his 1737 Drinker’s Dictionary, itemizing 288 phrases and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there have been greater than 353 synonyms for “drunk” listed in that yr’s version of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine famous 900 phrases used as drunkonyms.
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