Drunk or intoxicated.
Our Living Language Expressions for intoxication are among those that best showcase the creativity of slang. The boundless inventiveness in expressing the ordinary in not-so-ordinary ways led Walt Whitman to describe slang as “an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably.” Colloquial and slang expressions meaning “intoxicated” can fill several pages in slang thesauruses. Most fall into a few general groups. Common are expressions that originally meant “damaged, badly affected by something,” such as trashed, smashed, crocked, blitzed, hammered, wasted, messed up, and blasted. Cooking terms are also common, such as baked, fried, and boiled (said to have been coined at Princeton University in the 1920s). Terms relating to liquids or being filled are a natural source of metaphors for filling oneself up with drink or drugs: sloshed, oiled, tanked, and loaded are but a few. Some terms are not easily classified or have origins that are not fully clear, such as tight (first appearing in the 1830s), plastered (first appearing around 1912), blotto (perhaps from blot, first appearing in 1917), and stoned (apparently taken from such expressions as stone-drunk, stone-cold, and first appearing as stone in 1945). Most current terms for “intoxicated” are not very old, as one expects of slang terms generally; of those in the lists above, blotto, crocked, fried, loaded, plastered, tanked, tight, and oiled are recorded in the first half of the 20th century, and of these only tight and oiled are known to have existed before then.
