IF you have ever been plastered, hammered or smashed after a night out then you are in good company.
Linguistic researchers have discovered that there is a whopping 546 different terms Brits regularly use to describe being trollied, trousered, twatted or trashed.
They have also discovered that pretty much any noun can be transformed into a ‘drunkonym’ (a synonym for intoxicated) by simple sticking an ‘ed’ at the end.
The research validates a theory by comedian Michael McIntyre, claiming that Britons have the ability to use any word as indicating intoxication if it is prefaced by ‘I got completely…’.
As McIntyre joked in his routine.
“You can be ‘wellied’, or ‘trousered’, or ‘arseholed’. ‘I was rat-arsed.’ You can actually use any word in the English language and substitute it to mean ‘drunk’ as a posh person. It works. ‘Did you have a drink last night?’ – ‘You joking? I was utterly gazeboed.’
“It fits. ‘Are you planning on having a drink?’ – ‘Are you joking? I’m going to get totally and utterly carparked!’
“You can say anything, I mean. You can play this in your own time. ‘Last night, should have seen me … fucking pyjamaed!’
Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, of Chemnitz University in Germany, thinks it comes down to Britain’s rooted social culture of drinking alongside its Monty Python-style humour.
She said in the research: “In English, there’s an extremely large number of words that can mean drunk, and more can be formed simply by adding ‘ed’ to the end.
“It means pretty much any word in Britain can inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ automatically from the context.
“This humorous modifying of words is only possible because of the way sentences are constructed in English, and because the British really enjoy witty wordplay. For example, it would not work in German.”
The research has been published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. It has that found that English speakers regularly use a range of alternative words for ‘drunk’.
Think you know them all? Check out the top 36 names for being drunk below
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- Bladdered
- Inebriated
- Intoxicated
- Langered
- Legless
- Mashed
- Merry
- Mullered
- Pickled
- Pie-eyed
- Plastered
- Sloshed
- Smashed
- Tipsy
- Trashed
- Wasted
- Bevvied
- Blasted
- Blitzed
- Blootered
- Blotto
- Bombed
- Cabbaged
- Canned
- Fuddled
- Hammered
- Langers
- Lashed
- Loaded
- Ossified
- Paralytic
- Pissed
- Rat-arsed
- Ratted
- Screwed
- Slaughtered