Dec 31
100 Ways to Celebrate Amateur’s Night
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
vocabulary quiz
Happy New Year from Bill and Dave’s! And now, without further ado, this year’s 100 top words for being drunk, in no particular order. Remember: Don’t drink and drive, but if you do, drive fast! This way you limit your time on the road. Example: If you drive 100 miles per hour you get there four times faster than the person who drives only 25, thus limiting the danger you pose to others! At 200 mph you are only on the road eight minutes for a 25-mile trip! That slowpoke takes a whole hour, a lot more exposure to danger! The police love this kind of logic–try it when you’re pulled over! And tell ’em you saw it on Bill and Dave’s. But say Dave told you.
- Fluthered: I learned this one from Angela Patten, an Irish friend living in Vermont. Apparently it refers to a particular drunk in one play or another, no doubt Singe, but I can’t recall the actual reference—any help out there? Or are ye too fluthered to bozzer?
- Chiffoned: A favorite from high school, probably playing off shitfaced and that hairdo, but.
- Over Served: First heard from a very proper and indignant friend with a hangover. “I was over served!”
- Drunk as a Skunk: Another oldie that I first heard in the movie Cat Ballou
- Besotted: very sweet, seems to me, so useful for crushes and obsessions
- Hammered: A nice construction term, of which many:
- Nailed
- Leveled
- Plastered
- Sheetrocked: maybe a polite way to say shitfaced, dunno, certainly a play on preceding.
- Bent
- Whacked
- Lit
- Blasted
- Lost in the Ozone: Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen (“One drink of wine/two drinks of gin/and I’m lost in ozone agin!”) The commander used to stand on stage with an acoustic guitar, no strings, and stagger around and sometimes fall into the crowd playing these burning solos, actually produced by his guitarist standing stock still with back to audience.
- Stoned: Now, like “high,” and the few that follow, it means pretty much only pot, but that’s not what Dean Martin was talking about!
- High
- Ripped
- Buzzed
- Crapulous: Not “full of crap” as the suffix would suggest, but sick from drinking, or really hungover.
- Schnockered: I just always really liked this one, sounds kind of friendly–I’ll bet it’s German, so spelled it thus.
- Legless: This is what happens to Australians.
- Plotzed: Polish?
- Sloshed: lots of water words.
- Sozzled
- Sodden
- Soused
- Tanked
- Three Sheets to the Wind: Nautical, sheets being lines that control the sails
- Looped
- Tipsy: this is what happens to ladies who are over served, never worse.
- Blotto:
- Zonked
- Plowed
- Potted: I just love this one, like a plant, or maybe a chicken simmering whole among nice potatoes and such.
- Stewed: see above, and come to think of it a lot of cooking metaphors:
- Roasted
- Toasted
- Fricasseed
- Battered
- Fried
- Boiled
- Boiled (or anything else) to the gills
- Juiced
- Cabbaged
- Pickled: perfect image
- Stiff
- Tight
- Loose
- Shitfaced: Very American, no? Along with all the very unfriendly or self-hating or judgmental terms, like:
- Wrecked
- Ruined
- Shit-housed
- Fucked up
- Stinking
- Messed up
- Decimated
- Trashed
- Obliterated
- Polluted: something Catholic about this one…
- Wiped out
- Stinko
- Wasted
- Trashed
- Brain dead
- Embalmed
- Intoxicated: note the toxic embedded herein.
- Bertie Woostered: The British are more comical about it all, lots of B words:
- Badgered
- Banjaxed
- Battered
- Befuggered
- Bernard Langered
- Bewottled
- Bladdered
- Blootered
- Blathered
- Bleezin
- Blitzed
- Blottoed
- Bluttered
- Boogaloo
- Bowsered
- Buckled
- Brahms and Liszt: Must be from one of those rhyming games–to match with Pissed, no doubt.
- Besoffen: Deutshe
- Betrunken: Ditto
- Ivre: Francais
- Full: Norwegian, as in JEG AR FULL! Which you shout when you are drunk, pronounced Fool.
- Drita: Also Norwegian.
- Boracho: Espanol
- Juopunut: Finnish, and they say it a lot.
- Chunkahin: Japanese–I bet some insult about the Chinese
- Bezopen: Learned this in Bruxelles
- Gassosa: Italiano
- Keilazarus: Holland
- Lazarus: Holland, too. I guess Jesus brings you back after you’ve been dead drunk for four days.
- Logged: that’s what happens to you in Maine, also much of Canada
- Alcoholized: Australian favorite of mine…
- Drunk
One of my favorites from the Dominican Republic: “rodillos de goma” (knees of rubber) as in “Yo tengo rodillos de goma despues dos botellas de ron!”
Thanks for these. Leave it to the two of you!
L
Momma put bourbon in my baby bottle juices and rubbed my teething gums with hard liquor. I snuck sips from Dad’s beers and cocktails and both their drinking pals’. I was drunk from the get-go, but not really drunk until legal age, well, maybe once or twice before.
Having been an adult on a twenty-one-year binge, hardly sober any one day before going at it again, waking up still drunk, sweating out a respectable workday, and looking forward to hitting the bar again until the late wee earlies I’ve read, heard, or said an unending inventory of synonyms for being under the influence. I expect it’s about like sex acts, any word in an understandable context will do.
About every verb or noun and part of speech came up artfully redecorated. Anthimeria: a rhetorical substition scheme of one part of speech for another. I got verbed. I’m DUIed (dewied). I’m evermore clear. She’s a cruise pretty rig. I’m about athwart shy of a full house (athwart prounounced in Down East dialect a thought).
Sober now in my fifteenth year.
I’m feeling crapulous this morning….about to head out for bike ride that will hopefully sweat that feeling away.
And I thought Bernard Langerd was a term for well-hung. As in yours is long but mine is…..
Happy New Year, Bill! What a great list of words about being tipsy and I think you were channelling the great Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) in putting together your list. I looked up “fluthered” A Dictionary of Hiberno-English by By Terence Patrick Dolan which is in Google Books. The origin of the word is obscure, but Fluther was a character’s name in Casey’s Plough & the Stars. The Urban Dictionary says that “Fluthered” is a Dublin colloquialism which means, to “achieve a state of inebriation that renders one frivolous, silly and dangerously prone to saying things like, ‘I love you man’ and ‘You’re me besht mate!”
I found two more Irish words in the Hiberno-English Dictionary for inebriated: “stocious drunk” and “scuttered.” Have a great 2011!
Hi Bill,
Many thanks for your holiday-appropriate post! It brought me back a few years and provided a reminder to get to the store before closing – we are all out of Alka-Seltzer and Pepto Bismol.
Shit-faced, toasted, wasted and sloshed are the words I’ve used most often to describe someone who has had way too much to drink. But I like pickled so much that I might have to start using it too! (Embalmed seems like a terrific word for drunk but it gives me a creepy feeling.)
We are going to a party tonight (walking distance – yeah!). And – thanks to you – I plan to exclaim “JEG AR FULL!” in the presence of my native Norwegian neighbor. I think she will be impressed (and her minister husband, too)…
Happy New Year!
Dori