Other Terms for "Being Drunk"

What follows is an excerpt from an essay by Edmund Wilson. This essay appears in the book The American Earthquake, Da Capo Press, New York, 1996, pages 89-90. The book is a collection of essays by Edmund Wilson. The essay from which this excerpt is taken is dated March 9, 1927. The book was first published in 1958. I'd never heard of a lot of these terms. Several of them made me chuckle, such as "squiffy" and "zozzled".  Anyhow, hope you enjoy this excerpt.

Here's the excerpt:


The following is a list of words denoting drunkenness now in common use in the United States. They have been arranged, as far as possible, in order of the degrees of intensity of the conditions they represent, beginning with the mildest stages and progessing to the more disastrous.


lit
squiffy
oiled
lubricated
owled
edged
jingled
piffed
piped
sloppy
woozy
happy
half-screwed
half-cocked
half-shot
half seas over
fried
stewed
boiled
zozzled
sprung
scrooched
jazzed
jagged
canned
corked
corned
potted
hooted
slopped
tanked
stinko
blind
stiff
under the table
tight
full
wet
high
horseback
liquored
pickled
ginned
shicker (Yiddish)
spifflicated
primed
organized
featured
pie-eyed
cock-eyed
wall-eyed
glassy-eyed
bleary-eyed
hoary-eyed
over the Bay
four sheets to the wind
crocked
loaded
leaping
screeching
lathered
plastered
soused
bloated
polluted
saturated
full as a tick
loaded for bear
loaded to the muzzle
loaded to the plimsoll mark
wapsed down
paralyzed
ossified
out like a light
passed out cold
embalmed
buried
blotto
lit up like the sky
lit up like the Commonwealth
lit up like a Christmas tree
lit up like a store window
lit up like a church
fried to the hat
slopped to the ears
stewed to the gills
boiled as an owl
to have a bun on
to have a slant on
to have a skate on
to have a snootful
to have a skinful
to draw a blank
to pull a shut-eye
to pull a Daniel Boone
to have a rubber drink
to have a hangover
to have a head
to have the jumps
to have the shakes
to have the zings
to have the heeby-jeebies
to have the screaming-meemies
to have the whoops and jingles
to burn with a low blue flame

[And that's the end of the list -- all these words denoting drunkenness came from Edmund Wilson's essay titled "The Lexicon of Prohibition" written in 1927. Hope you enjoyed getting to see the list!]