You can’t be too much surprised by the many expression that meant ‘drunk’ in the Twenties.

You could be bleary-eyed, bent, blind, blotto, boiled, boiled as an owl, burning with a blue flame, canned, corked, corned, crocked, edged, embalmed, fried, fried to the hat, four sheets in the wind, full, ginned, half-cocked, half seas over, half-screwed, half-shot, happy, high, hoary-eyed, jazzed, jingle, lathered, liquored, lit, lit up like a Christmas tree, lit up like a store window, lit up like the commonwealth, loaded, loaded for beer, loaded to the muzzle, lubricated, oiled, over the bay, ossified, owled, paralyzed, plastered, pie-eyed, pickled, piffed, piped, plastered,polluted, potted, primed, saturated, slopped, sloppy, stiff, stinko, soused, squiffy, stewed, spifflicated, sprung, tanked, tight, lit, under the table, wall-eyed, wet, woozy.

And my favourite: zozzled

To be zozzled means to be drunk and is probably an alteration of the older sozzled, which is from about 1886. Sozzled comes from sozzle, to spill or splash, often in a messy manner. Related may be soss referring to a dirty puddle, falling lazily into a seat, or a lazy person. Soss may be imitative in origin. To sossle means to “go about in an aimless idle manner,” according to the OED. Zozzled seems to have first appeared in writer Edmund Wilson‘s 1927 Lexicon of Prohibition, “a catalogue looking back to [Ben] Franklin’s The Drinker’s Dictionary.

– Our 13 favourite words from Boardwalk Empire

And believe me, after a month of posting everyday, I feel all of the above!

RESOURCES

Slang Vocabulary of the Jazz Age (pdf)