When viewed soberly, it is construction grammar. However, behind the cumbersome term from linguistics there is currently a tasty topic hidden. The two linguists Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer from Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig from Erlangen University have managed to in the English language 546 synonyms for “drunk”, to find. The study is in Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association appeared, as the journal of German cognitive linguists is confusingly called. Looking for drunk names, seriously? Or was that just a crazy idea?
In the video call, both prove to be cheerful but not tipsy researchers who were not averse to field research at the counter during their studies in England. “Michael McIntyre gave us the idea,” says Sanchez-Stockhammer. In one of his programs, the British comedian shows that in English almost any word fits if the construction “to be” plus an intensifying adverb such as “totally” is used and terms ending in “-ed” are made into verbs. “I am totally carparked” or “completely pajamaed” are examples of how the terms can be as far removed from the topic of alcohol as the drinker in the pub is from the glass of water when he takes the “last order”.
“If every term fits, it’s not the meaning of the word that matters, but the context,” says Peter Uhrig. “The English apparently like to talk about their drunkenness – and they love to express this state indirectly, with ironic distance and with puns.” Verbally intoxicated in this way, Brits also understand “Brahms” or “Mozart” as a linguistic code to indicate an alcoholic loss of control. The point is to avoid the term “pissed”, which is politely described as “drunk”. “Mozart and Liszt” or “Brahms and Liszt” has become widespread in Cockney dialect slang because the pairs of composers rhyme with the common non-word. Over time, the word pairs were shortened to “Brahms” or “Mozart” and the drunkonym remained. “There is a lot of wit and humor in English,” says Sanchez-Stockhammer.
There is still potential in German too
You don’t have to be excited, fired up, tight-lipped or hard-headed to realize that there aren’t nearly as many drunkonyms in German as there are in English. Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig had searched in encyclopedias and databases and evaluated terms for “drunk” that radio listeners sent in. “In German, the longest list had 71 terms,” says the researcher from Chemnitz. Many drunkonyms use prefixes like “zer-” or “ange-“, and the topic area is quite narrow with variations of “dense”, “full” and endings in “drunk” and “drunk”.
Perhaps the linguists should trust the pioneering site Beerpong.de. Drunkonyms such as “paint your helmet”, “galvanize your gutter” or “put an organ in the sacristy” fall into the areas of crafts and church music. Such phrases, like “spruce one behind the beech tree,” show an almost English-sounding distance in meaning from the actual facts of the matter.