Bar scrawl
It started out as a joke that felt too accurate to ignore. British stand-up comedian Michael Mcintyre trotted out the theory, during a 2009 comedy tour at home, that almost any English word could be used to mean “very drunk”, from the familiar “hammered” to the completely random “gazeboed”, “carparked” and “toastered”.
The joke went viral, and drew the attention of two German linguists.
Christina Sanchez-stockhammer (professor of digital linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology) and Peter Uhrig (computational linguistics scholar then with Dresden University, and now at University of Erlangen-nuremberg), decided to try to determine what makes it possible for such a wide range of expressions to signify a single idea.
Their study on “drunkonyms” was published in Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association in February. “For our research, we compiled a list of synonyms for the adjective ‘drunk’, from fairly recent user-generated sources such as Wiktionary, a thesaurus (Collins) and the largest English dictionary (OED),” says Sanchez-stockhammer.
The search excluded synonyms that featured the word “drunk”, and then narrowed in on adjectives alone. The result was still an appendix of 546 words — a number so high that it took the researchers by surprise. How were so many terms being used in this way?
Usage turned out to be key; most of the unexpected terms were accompanied by intensifiers such as “completely”, and ended with the suffix “–ed”. Of the 546 expressions studied, the suffix “–ed” appeared in 312.
Even terms such as “trolleyed” and “pyjamaed” seem to work, when preceded by a word like “totally”.
Interestingly, it is possible that the taboo associated with drunkenness, particularly drunkenness in young people, has given rise to this phenomenon, the researchers say. Using newer expressions “allows for something less of a taboo”, Sanchez-stockhammer says.
Among the big surprises: a term that seems startling, but reveals rather tame roots. Don’t say “pissed”, say “Brahms and Liszt”. The names of the two 19thcentury European composers are simply Cockney rhyming slang for “drunk”.