For my 12th Top 10 list I’m feeling word nerdy, so it’s time to break out the Drunk Words, a project I worked on several years ago and finally got back on line last year. One of things I absolutely love about the English language is just how many words we have for the same thing, especially colloquialisms, better known as slang. If you accept the anthropologist theory that what’s important to a culture can be deduced by the number of words it has for certain aspects of its culture (which I don’t, BTW) then the nearly 2,000 words for being drunk would say quite a bit. Only sex and parts of the body seem to have more. Anyway, my choices are based simply on the way the words sound or some other ephemeral quality that I like, like cleverness or the pure unabashed silliness of the phrase. For this list, I stuck to phrases rather than single words, which I’ll reserve for a later top ten list. There are so many great drunken phrases to choose from, take a look at the list and let me know your faves. Anyway, here’s List #12:
Top 10 Drunk Phrases
| Called Earl on the Big White Phone (sometimes it’s Ralph that’s called) | |
| Breath Strong Enough to Carry Coal With | |
| Sir Richard Has Taken Off His Considering Cap | |
| Amicably Incandescent | |
| Laughing at the Carpet | |
| Nicely Irrigated with Horizontal Lubricant | |
| Put to Bed with a Shovel | |
| Got His Snowsuit On and Heading North | |
| Cork High and Bottle Deep | |
| Diluted the Blood in His Alcohol System |
It was really difficult to keep the list to ten, and a great many colorful phrases were left on the cutting room floor. Here’s a few more that almost made the list:
Blue Around the Gills, Brahms & Liszt [Cockney], Full Up to the Brain, Got Up to the Third Story, Has Taken Hippocrates’ Grand Elixr, In Tipium Grove, Letting the Finger Ride the Thumb, The Malt is Above the Water, Moist Around the Edges, Shellacked the Goldfish Bowl, Sniffed the Barmaid’s Apron, Swallowed a Hare, and Under the Affluence of Incohol.
Let me know your favorites, and if you see any you know of that are missing from the list, please post a comment and I’ll add it.
Also, if you have any ideas for future Top 10 lists you’d like to see, drop me a line.
I was at a wedding on the Jersey Shore, just north of Atlantic City, a few years back and learned the phrase “Got tuned up last night.”
To use in a sentence, “The boy and I are gonna get tuned up before we see Springsteen at the Meadowlands.”
-Motor
Not necesarily a common phrase, but it always makes me smile. At my bachelor party. on the eve of the wedding, one of my groomsmen got rather intoxicated and laid on the floor of the living room next to cases full of butterflies (wedding props, don’t ask), prompting him to drunkenly roll around mumbling, “Butterflies, Butterflies! Butterflies around my head!”
“He had a case of the wobbly boot”(Australian-thanks Elk!)
I was almost crying laughing about this list. Certainly you could do a top 10 about terms for throwing up, but maybe that would be too sophomoric for your sophisticated site. And now, after I make an offering to the porcelain gods, I shall depart by driving the drunk bus.
Let’s Kick Part this Starty!
Officer, I swear to Drunk i’m not god….
No officer, there’s no blood in my alcohol system!
One morning after a heavy (and I mean Heavy) night out, my mate Liam and I woke up in his bedroom. In the middle of the afternoon, the housekeeper abruptly disturbed our hangoverish sleeping and kicked us out the bedroom. We walked down to the living room wondering what the fuck she was so mad about…
Once we get to the living room, Liam’s father (an old school Aussie) goes: “Hey Liam, Ketut is mad cuz you parked your tiger all over the bathroom last night”
????????
Parked the tiger?
“Yeah, you spewed all over the place son, she wasn’t happy about that…”
Peace