Drinking Terms

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Welcome to another mini-cast from A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett. Today we’re talking to lexicographer Paul Dixon. Paul has recently published a brand new book called Drunk, the Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary, but he’s also known for his Baseball Dictionary and his Dictionary of the Space Age.

Welcome, Paul.

Thank you, Grant.

I’m looking here.

You’ve got more than 2,900 synonyms for tipsy, drunk, and so forth.

How did you collect these?

The real reason I collected them, I guess that’s really before the how, is I’d always wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

And years ago, I decided, you know, I started looking at it as a problem to be solved.

And at that time, in order to get in there, you had to do things like push a peanut across Iowa with your nose or eat a bicycle or something, which are actually things that people have done.

And then I started looking at, with the help of Fred Misch, I was, of Merrin Webster, we were talking about it one day.

He said, why don’t you look at language?

And I looked at language, and language was interesting, or lexicography, because it had things like the longest acronym.

And then there was a, the word with the most meanings was S-E-T-S-S-E-T, which the O-E-D, I think, had 137 different meanings down in verb.

So I started looking at these things.

I said, you know, the one they don’t have here is synonym.

And so I gravitated quickly.

I looked at other things like body parts, sexual acts, you know, words for money.

I looked at all the normal suspects.

And it was really clear to me that drunk was the winner.

And shortly after that, I started realizing that other people had done this.

Benjamin Franklin had a list.

Ambrose Bierce had a list.

Edmund Wilson had a list.

And even the early writers at Chaucer and Shakespeare euphemized drunk to some degree with different terms.

So it was just a pleasure to sort of start looking for these things.

Yeah, I see here that you mentioned Langston Hughes also kept a list.

Langston Hughes, yeah, in the Chicago, he published one in the Chicago Defender.

So it sort of goes with being a writer because, and there are others too.

I mean, Dickens did a short list in Household Words.

And the idea was that at any given time in history, there are going to be clever new ways to euphemize drunkenness.

I mean, up through and including one of the recent ones was Feng Shui, which was from Feng Shui.

The furniture in your brain has been reorganized by, or redesigned by a liquor.

And so it was just, I think that writers did, was to come up with nice and light for the users.

And a very serious guy like Edmund Wilson came up with a list.

Edmund Wilson actually did them in sort of a scale from tipsy to blotto, which he thought was the ultimate state of drunk.

Yeah, what is the word that most means drunk?

What is the one that is the highest level of severity?

I think dead drunk, which actually is used in Shakespeare and others.

It goes way back.

It’s that state of inebriation where the difference between you and a dead person is very small.

You’ve been so totally harmed yourself.

And part of the fun of this has been just the collecting of it, because somebody will be reading Carl Hyassim.

They’ll be reading John O’Hara or they’ll be reading so-and-so and they’ll call me up or send me an email and say, oh, I just found you.

Did you know that so-and-so used this term in this book?

And so a lot of it is that writers, because it’s such a strange state, I mean, it’s self-imposed and it has different ways of expressing itself.

I mean, some people who overindulge are either mildly drunk or they’re belligerently drunk or they’re sort of mellow.

So there’s a lot of room for sort of variation in the whole thing.

And the other thing that I always have to bring up, because it was, I mean, it’s a lot of somebody who wrote an Amazon review saying,

You know, you should go to this book because it’s a celebration of drunkenness.

It really isn’t.

I wouldn’t have done it if it was, because obviously drunkenness is a social ill, but it’s really a celebration of English.

It’s the fact that English has these, just this extraordinary way of taking a condition and giving you different words for it, different phrases.

Yeah, I think anyone who actually looked at this list, and it’s a long list, would find that most of these terms really have a high correlation to things that, as you put it, do damage to you, like terminated or thrashed or throttled.

These are not necessarily nice, pleasant words.

And even the cooking ones are stewed and fried and fricasseed.

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

There’s definitely damage.

Let me ask you, perhaps this is a little far afield.

I’ve always been interested in tight as a word for drunk.

It’s something, it’s fallen out of fashion.

It’s definitely nobody, I’d say under 40, really uses that without an ironic wink or without being an author of historical literature.

What happened to tight? Why do we not use that anymore?

Because some of them are contradictory.

You also said, well, he’s just a man who’s been slung on those gears.

He’s just as loose as a goose, you know.

Right.

So it could be.

I think it, I don’t know.

It just, it’ll probably come back.

Somebody will discover it.

It’ll show up in some modern piece of literature, and then it’ll come back again.

FAP was one from Shakespeare.

That one’s probably gone forever.

But Shakespeare also talked about somebody, you know, seeing the sun.

And, you know, the sun in his eyes.

In other words, somebody would come into some room late at night and he’d be blinking as if he’d just, you know, seen the sun.

And, of course, he had just been drinking.

So I think these things come in cycles.

Well, I’ve got a list for you to make for your next book or maybe your next edition of this one.

And it’s those terms that mean sober that are actually looked at in light of alcohol itself.

Like one of my favorites is to mean sober is between drinks.

So it’s a smaller list maybe, maybe not worth its own book, but maybe an article.

But there’s certainly a – alcohol is such an important part of the writing exercise or historically has been or has been characterized that way.

Do you think that’s why there’s such proliferation that in order to add color to your work, you write about a thing which changes a person’s nature so that there’s your kind of – it’s a minor plot engine?

I think so.

And I think – well, I think there’s that.

I think that it’s just the way you show off.

That’s the reason why somebody like Carl Hyassman and a lot of the people who write about crime novels will use Robert B. Parker, will come up with clever ways of saying it.

Just like there are clever ways of saying that somebody’s a little bit off, not a brick shy of a load or a taco short of a combination platter, which isn’t the same as full-blown mental illness.

It’s more of like a slight personality deficit of some sort, or a bubble off of plum in reference to a carpenter’s thing.

I think the other thing you’ve got to factor in here is that the call somebody drunk, especially in Britain, the law is pretty specific.

You can be held liable.

If you say so-and-so is drunk at a party, then so the British have come up with a huge sort of a list of euphemisms, like saying somebody that, the famous one from, I think it was the Spy magazine, which was to say somebody was tired and emotional, and those sort of things.

And I think we do that, too, to some degree.

I think when Benjamin Franklin composed his list, a lot of them, he did it with some degree of despair, because a lot of them were just ways of sort of making it more polite, making it more acceptable, whereas somebody could be, you know, just behaving wretchedly and being dirty and drunk and out of their mind.

And somebody would call it, well, he’s tipsy or something.

And it was a way of saying that there’s a euphemism here that’s to some degree corrosive.

I have in front of me the third edition of your baseball dictionary, and this is a phenomenal work.

This is the one that you’re most known for, right?

In baseball, this is the book that people turn to when they want to know about baseball language.

Yeah, no, it’s been a lifetime obsession, and it’s been a lot of fun.

And the great thing about being a lexicographer or…

Because you don’t need a degree to be a lexicographer, by the way.

No, no, no.

If you look at some of the great works, you know,

Go at Merriam-Webster and H.L. Mencken and others,

They never had a PhD in lexicography.

They were just… That’s what they became.

Yeah, curiosity plus patience, right?

Mencken’s work is just still one of the finest things ever done in the American language.

So I picked up the ball.

I just decided I wanted to become the Noah Webster of baseball.

It was a little bit of ego in it.

That’s why I put my name on it.

But it’s just been a wonderfully exhilarating experience.

I’m getting, you know, even with the third edition out, which is 4.2 pounds,

It’s a monumentally large book, and it’s put over 10,000 entries.

I’m still getting letters and emails every day from somebody who’s just heard a new term

Or a new statistical way of looking at baseball has emerged.

I’m getting a lot of letters actually from kids who are very interested in baseball

And go to the parks or listen on the radio and they’ll hear something new

And I’ll get a letter in the mail from somebody written on three-wing binder paper

In block letters saying, you know, Mr. Dixon, you have forgotten my favorite term.

I got one the other day that said that I’d forgotten foam finger.

You know, those monstrous things.

Oh, sure.

But so it’s a lot of, it’s as much fun as you’re going to have,

Is compiling a dictionary,

Especially one that you know you can keep revising over the course of your lifetime.

Yeah, and know that there’s always work there to be done, right?

Yeah, and it’s all new.

I mean, there’s new, I get a lot of notes lately for, you know,

The new nickname for the new Yankee Stadium,

And there’s always something going on, always a new method of analysis.

And the other fun of it is there are new ways of looking at the 19th and 18th century

For terminology with these databases and the search engines

And the more and more of the historically important documents going online.

So, you know, the scholarship is now wide open.

And the other great thing about the dictionary was it’s to some degree built on the concept

But of Tom Sawyer and the White Fence,

Where Tom Sawyer’s painting the fence

And he’s having such a good time

That everybody else wants to paint the fence

So he ends up getting everybody else to work for him.

And I literally had over 300 people

Help me with the dictionary,

People who signed on saying,

Boy, I’d like to help you work on the etymologies,

Work on the first usage,

Work on the way this book’s going to come out.

And I probably have more PhDs working for the dictionary

Than most Midwestern universities, you know, Big Ten universities.

A couple hundred PhDs working for me on this thing.

Yeah, my name is in there somewhere, I admit.

Yeah, you’re part of the army.

But you’ve been at this for quite a while.

You got a start in lexicography some decades ago, right?

Yeah, no, I’ve written 55 books.

I’ve always been a collector of language.

I’ve always been, from the time I was a kid, I loved just the idea of coming up with synonyms

And learning something through the language.

And, you know, I remember many years ago, and it was just out of the service,

And I got in a car, in a cab, with a cabbie who’d been a carnival worker.

He was an older guy.

He must have been 70 years old, but he’d spent all his life in the carnival.

And it was a long ride to the airport.

And all of a sudden he started talking about carnival slang.

And he had this term, which was hard flash.

And hard flash was something that, in a carnival,

A kid would spend all his money trying to win for his girlfriend.

It would be like a gilded Palomino horse with a clock inside of it

Or a monstrous teddy bear.

And this guy was talking about hard flash

And that young guys, in order to impress their girlfriends,

Would spend all their money on these things.

And I remember getting out of the cab and I said,

Man, that’s a great term.

And I started looking at things in terms of hard flash,

Meaning something that’s sort of glitzy and worthless,

But very appealing to me at the moment.

And it just became sort of my interest.

You know, other people collected baseball cards and things growing up.

I collected words.

And I used to love to stump adults.

Even as a kid, I’d come up with some really strange name.

I remember when I was a little kid, we were in a place in Connecticut,

And there was a brook.

The name of the book is An Aramaic Now Who Sank a Tank of Shunk.

I took great glee in learning how to say that word.

You know, I kind of got a little road sign, but it’s a long, long Native American word.

So yeah, I’ve done a lot with it, and I love it.

And it’s infectious.

I mean, the idea that we really have in the English language is the use of language as recreation.

And the very impulses that drive us to crossword puzzles and Scrabble and all the rest of it

Also drive us to come up with lists of words for drunk and baseball dictionaries and such.

That sort of absolute fascination with this one tool we have, which is so remarkable.

In our case, the English language, which is an Eldorado of great material, as you know.

Yeah, definitely.

Paul Dixon is the author of more than 50 books.

His latest work is Drunk, the Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary.

Paul, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

I really appreciate it, Grant.

You’ve been listening to a minicast from A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

You can find out more about our program at waywordradio.org,

And you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org

With your language questions, or call us at any time, 1-877-929-9673.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

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