Vintage Slang Terms For Being Drunk Are Hilarious A Century Later

Do you think that people didn't get wasted back in ye olden tymes?

You're right. But they did occasionally drink enough beer, wine and liquor to get loaded, topheavy, boryeyed, moory and podgy.

All are listed in an amazing sidebar of synonyms for "drunk" published in the St. Louis Republic on June 30, 1901. I happened upon it while trawling through "Chronicling America," a fantastic online archive of historical newspapers administered by the Library of Congress, and I haven't stopped LOLing since.

It's unclear how many of the 166 terms and words connoting drunkenness were actually in regular use back in 1901 -- some may be fanciful inventions of the newspaper's staff. (For comparison's sake, the usually-definitive Roget's International Thesaurus contains a mere 121 synonyms for "intoxicated.) But regardless of their provenance, we'd strongly support their return to the vernacular in 2013.

Here is the full list, with our favorite terms in bold and images of drunkenness from centuries past interspersed throughout.

And finally, this is the actual sidebar, to prove that I'm not making this up. It was printed right below a photo essay on "Beautiful Interiors of Some of the St. Louis Churches," because, "Why not?"