The Tall Dog Sat, Mildly Contemplating

From The Dabbler UK ( like WHAM! ) via our pal Andy :

The Dictionary of Slang :

DRUNK

It all starts, as it should with booze, or rather bouse or bowse, which turns up in the very first ‘slang dictionary’, Robert Copland’s Hye Way to the Spitel Hous, published c. 1535. The word comes from the Dutch buizen or German bausen, and both mean to drink to excess. Further back one finds a deeper Dutch root, buise, a large drinking vessel. The word crossed the north sea in 1300, but still as the container rather than the contained, and it was not until the 16th century underworld took it up that bouse, and booze as it has been spelt since the 1670s, really took off.


After that, the terms come thick and fast. There’s a simple group of similes; dunk as a bastard, bat, boiled owl, brewer’s fart, cook, dog, fiddler (or his bitch), fish, fly, fowl, hog, king, little red wagon, lord, monkey, pig, piper, poet, skunk (in a trunk), tick, top, and a wheelbarrow. There is also, of course, pissed, often, if implausibly as a fart, newt or rat. ( the rest )