The English have an enormous vocabulary for describing intoxication. A new report from German linguists Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Chemnitz University of Technology) and Peter Uhrig (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) examined why British people have such a large number of words to express the idea of being drunk in a humorous way — so-called “drunkonyms” like “hammered” or “wasted” — and how new “drunkonyms” are frequently created out of seemingly random words.
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