Eat words, drink 'em and be merry!
'Tis the season to be jolly, a delicious word for my favourite state.
In honour of jollity (joviality, jocundity, or jocosity if you prefer)
allow me to offer obscure words for verbivores to eat, drink and make merry with this Christmas.
And there's a drunken parlour game at the end. Wassail!
Eat
festical: an old Sussex word for a feast
peg-away: to eat or drink voraciously
manducation: the act of eating
gulosity: greed in eating
burnish: to grow fat
Drink
huckle-my-buff: beer, eggs and brandy
husser-and-squencher: a pot of beer with a dram of gin in it
flip: beer, rum, and sugar, heated with a red-hot iron
stingo: strong ale
heavy wet: strong ale mixed with porter
And be merry
fresh: not quite drunk, but rather noisy
concerned in liquor: drunk
curious: unsteadily drunk
There are thousands of English language terms for inebriation...more here.
Bonus parlour game [parlour not included]
There are so many things we could be as drunk as that guessing them, or - even better - making new ones up, ought to be Christmas parlour games. I’ll leave that with you. Enjoy.
Are you as drunk as...?
A lord
A judge
A sailor
A beggar
Chloe (said to refer to a nude portrait)
A piper
A fiddler
A fiddler’s whippet (I treacled this one up a bit)
An owl
A boiled owl
David’s sow (any sow will do, but David's had six legs)
A ship’s cat
A monkey
A skunk
A newt
A mouse
A fish
A wheelbarrow
A handcart
Sin itself
Hell (or Hull)
A fart in a vacuum cleaner (found online, therefore true)
A [insert national stereotype]
A [insert favourite sweary word]
A pickled egg (I made that one up)
Wishing all a jolly Christmas filled with delicious words - here's a festive Victorian jellyfish.
Main art: Carl Larsson's A Christmas Eve via Wikimedia Commons