#SAILING SLANG FREE#

Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if a pint of foaming ale or glass of tantalizing red is beckoning from the hands of February, cheers. Tosspot or hydropot, English has lessons for us all. (Worse still, a Vice-Admiral of those same seas is ‘a drunken man that pisses under the table into his companion’s shoes’.) Not for nothing, perhaps, were those who liked to throw back their mug of beer and drink its contents with relish known as ‘tosspots’ from the start. He surely would not, then, have approved of two expressions that emerged in the sailors’ slang of his day.Īn Admiral of the Narrow Seas is defined in Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongueas “one who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him”. It was Vernon who gave the unhappy order that his sailors’ rations of rum should be diluted with water. Fittingly, ‘groggy’ itself was born on the high seas thanks to the English naval officer Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed Old Grog on account of his thick coat made of coarse grogram cloth. Especially if you’re a sailor, whose associations with rum are legendary.

Anyone described as ‘sturdy’ in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.īirds do it, newts do it, even educated lords do it: the pull of getting groggy seems hard to resist. Bizarrely, our English word ‘sturdy’ may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. We may be ‘pissed as a newt’ these days, but for the Romans the image of choice would be ‘drunk as a thrush’, an allusion it seems to the bird’s merry tottering around vineyards after feasting on fermented grapes. There’s an even more surprising word to add to this list. Lampooning and carousing went together – appropriately enough given that ‘carouse’ is from the German gar aus trinken, meaning ‘drink to the bottom of the glass’. As those songs tended to be mocking and satirical, so our modern sense of ridicule crept in. ‘ Lampons!’, for the French, meant ‘let us drink!’, and was an exhortation to merry revellers to pick up their glasses and sing a song or two. While we like nothing better than lampooning politicians on social media these days, that word too has its roots in guzzling. ‘Small beer’, on the other hand, was a heavily watered-down version of the original, enjoyed by both children and adults when drinking water could prove a lot more perilous than ale.

The adjective ‘bridal’ began as ‘bride-ale’, and was used of a wedding feast that featured plenty of the strong stuff. ‘Amethyst’ itself came to the language from the Ancient Greek amethustos, which means ‘not drunken’, because the stone was once believed to hold magical properties that prevented intoxication.įor all that partakers in dry January have avoided such results of befuddlement directly, it would be hard to do so with their more metaphorical tongues, for drinking is behind a surprising number of words that have since hidden their tipsy history. In days gone by, drinkers opted for extreme cure-alls for the morning after the night before, from the ashes of a crab to the drinking of vinegar, although the wealthier might have preferred dropping an amethyst into their glass before imbibing. Those who’ve made it, however, can console themselves with the fact that they have enjoyed weeks without the unpleasantness of feeling ‘crapulent’, ‘cropsick’, or ‘wamble-cropped’: three beautifully expressive words for the dreaded hangover. Such a lush lexicon makes it all the harder to forsake alcohol for a whole month.

#SAILING SLANG FREE#

Add those to the 3,000 words English currently holds for the state of being drunk (including ‘ramsquaddled’, ‘obfusticated’, ‘tight as a tick’, and the curious ‘been too free with Sir Richard’) and you’ll find that the only subjects that fill the pages of English slang more are money and sex. The concoctions those knights dispensed fill an even richer lexicon, veering from the euphemistic ‘tiger’s milk’ to the blatant invitation of ‘strip-me-naked’.

Sailing slang