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But then again …
You’ve probably heard the old saw about Eskimos and snow. You know, that Eskimos have 400 words for snow because they are so familiar with it in all its variety. In actuality, they have only four words for snow but that’s not important here. The idea that a group of people would have a specialized lexicon for something they know well is what I am interested in today. I got to thinking about this because today is Halloween, and in this part of the world the holiday for adults seems to revolve around alcohol, being consumed in mass quantity.
Somehow, when you get in costume it makes it OK to overindulge. Maybe because you feel sort of invisible? Then I began to think about all the words and phrases that we use to describe that condition. I know I may have missed a few but here’s what I found, in loose alphabetical order. Your mileage may vary. Fasten your seatbelts. Befuddled, bent, besotted, blacked out, blasted, blind, blitzed, blotto, boiled-as-an-owl (where did that come from?), bombed. And that’s just the Bs.
Clobbered, cockeyed, crocked, destroyed, dipso, drunk as a skunk (do skunks really drink? A lot? Is that why they smell?), drunk-as-a-lord, flattened (I first heard that one in the boardroom of a local beer distributor. We were, at the time, pretty flat.) fried, hammered, hooched-up, high as a kite, hung-one-on, inebriated, in one’s cups, juiced, legless, liquored-up, looped, mellow, obliterated (is it just me or do a lot of these sound sort of violent?) pickled, pie-eyed, pissed, plastered, plowed, plotzed, polluted, ripped, roaring drunk, sauced, shit-faced, sloshed, smashed, soused, sizzled, spaced, stewed, stiff, stinking, stinko (which I guess is the past tense of stinking?), stoned (as in Ray Charles “Let’s go get stoned”). swacked, tanked, tied-one-on, three-sheets-to-the-wind, tight, tipsy, toasted, under-the-influence, under-the-table, under-the-weather (three unders!), wasted, wiped-out, zoned and zonked.
It’s interesting to me that when you try to come up with a similar list for not being drunk you don’t get many. Sober. Stone-cold sober. Sober as a judge. Straight.
It must mean we know a hell of a lot about being flattened. And not so much about being sober. I was thinking about continuing the list with the words to describe an unfortunate side effect of drinking, that is “driving the porcelain bus,” but I have run out of space. Too bad. I love “Technicolor yawn.” Or then again…I could be wrong.