Bar scrawl: Can almost any word mean ‘drunk’?
How is it that ‘hammered’ can mean drunk, but so can ‘gazeboed’, ‘carparked’ and ‘pyjamaed’? Inspired by a viral joke, two German linguists break it down.
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 on YouTube, and drew the attention of two German linguists, who got to thinking about why, exactly, this would be.
Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (professor of English and digital linguistics at the Chemnitz University of Technology) and Peter Uhrig (a computational linguistics scholar then with Dresden University of Technology, and now at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), decided to test McIntyre’s claim and 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 to a thesaurus by a dictionary publisher (Collins) and items extracted from the largest dictionary of the English language (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. “I personally don’t know if any other idea is expressed in so many ways,” Sanchez-Stockhammer says.
Usage turned out to be key to conveying the idea of drunkenness.
The researchers found that where traditional terms for “drunk” were usually accompanied by “too”, “so” or “very”, the kinds of examples that McIntyre presented usually came with intensifiers such as “completely” or “totally”, and ended with the suffix “–ed”. Of the 546 expressions in the study appendix, the suffix “–ed” appeared in 312.
Even terms such as “trolleyed” and “pyjamaed” seemed to adequately convey the idea, when preceded by a word like “completely”.
It turned out McIntyre hadn’t just been riffing; he’d been right. Many of the terms he listed were already in Urban Dictionary, the crowdsourced repository of English slang, at the time of his tour. Some entries dated to a year or two before; many more have been added since.
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. It allows for a sense of levity to replace a term of censure. Hence: “I was totally… carparked.”
McIntyre’s idea that “any word” could be used appears too general a claim, Sanchez-Stockhammer adds. “But the vastness of the list was quite overwhelming.”
Among the greatest surprises is a term that seems startling at first, but soon reveals rather tame roots. Don’t say “pissed”, say “Brahms and Liszt”. The names of the two 19th-century European composers are Cockney rhyming slang for “drunk”.
“The larger conclusion that we draw from it all is that the English language is fascinatingly creative and flexible,” Sanchez-Stockhammer says. “Even now, new words are being added to the lexicon of drunkenness.”
