drunk as a skunk?

Question

why is it that when you are drunk you get compared to animals?

drunk as a skunk
p****d as a newt
and sick as a parrot (though that one not entirely reserved for alcohol use!)

did they get animals drunk and see what they did? lol

Answer 1

drunk as a lord
Also, drunk as a fiddler or skunk; falling-down or roaring drunk. Extremely intoxicated, as in He came home drunk as a lord. The three similes have survived numerous others. The first was considered proverbial by the mid-1600s and presumably alludes to the fact that noblemen drank more than commoners (because they could afford to). The fiddler alludes to the practice of plying musicians with alcohol (sometimes instead of pay), whereas skunk, dating from the early 1900s, was undoubtedly chosen for the rhyme. The most graphic variant alludes to someone too drunk to keep his or her balance, as in He couldn't make it up the stairs; be was falling-down drunk. And roaring drunk, alluding to being extremely noisy as well as intoxicated, was first recorded in 1697

Answer 2

Since skunks do not drink alcohol, "drunk as a skunk" (meaning "extremely inebriated") cannot be pinned on the habits of Mephitis mephitica, the charming North American mammal and member of the weasel family which takes its name from the Algonquian Indian word meaning "urinating fox." The term "drunk as a skunk" is, as you guessed, simply a good example of our love of comparisons and rhyming, made especially popular by the fact that "skunk" happens to be one of the few words that rhymes with "drunk." Similar, albeit non-rhyming, terms for "extremely drunk" have included, over the years, drunk as a fly, a log, a dog, a loon, a poet, a billy goat, a broom, a bat, a badger, a boiled owl, and several dozen more too risqué to list here. Although comparative terms for drunkenness have been popular throughout the history of English, "drunk as a skunk" seems to be a fairly recent (20th century) addition to the canon.

The ability of our friend the skunk to douse its enemies with foul-smelling musk has, however, made "skunk" a slang term of derogation in other senses. "Skunk" has, since the early 19th century, been slang for "a contemptible or untrustworthy person," as in "That little skunk told us to buy Enron stock while he was selling his own." And because the odor of a skunk's musk is strong enough to discourage even the bravest competitor, "to skunk" has, since the 1800s, meant "to emphatically, unequivocally defeat," often used in situations where the losing party or team did not score a single point (as in "The Mets got skunked again. I'm moving to New Jersey").

The word "booze" itself has, we are told, been in use since the early fourteenth century; we have been tippling since 1581, though surprisingly grog has only been around since the year before Trafalgar.
You have been squiffy for just over a century, plastered since 1924, blotto since 1917, and if you are stinko paralytico you have the authority of Evelyn Waugh in "Put Out More Flags" (1942). Are you Adrian Quist (Australian, 1978), or Brahms and Liszt (1978)? Might you prefer to be uncontemporaneous and hence Mozart and Liszt (1979) or what about just plain p*ssed (1929).

Of course, these dates are simply snapshots in time, referring to the first printed record. They capture the youth of a slang term rather than its infancy, but I am surprised that no-one was as p*ssed as a newt in print before 1957 and I refuse to accept that I did not know any p*ss artists (1977) as an undergraduate.

Like parrots and newts, owls too have been unfairly accused of being p*ssed

Answer 3

I know the skunk one. I don't know the others. When you are drunk as hell. The Alcohol comes out of your pores when U sweat. So you smell strongly of alcohol. And we all know a skunk smells strong of Skunk. So that's where drunk as a skunk comes from. I'm not sure about the p****d as a newt (What is p****d?) Or the sick as a parrot.

Answer 4

I genuinely were unable to unearth an starting place for the expression "inebriated as a skunk"; even if, I genuinely have some recommendations about the way it got here into being. you've heard the expressions "stinking inebriated" and "stinko" ("stinking" has been utilized in English to precise disgust because the fifteenth century). No creature alive is stinkier than a skunk. because "skunk" rhymes with "inebriated," both words are a organic experience. as well this the skunk is an awkward animal. once you have ever seen a skunk wander from one garbage can to a special, you may want to imagine it became inebriated. in spite of the organic affinity of the words in this expression, I doubt that it got here into existence earlier the middle of the present century because it has a as a lot as date sound to me. S. D. Liddiard, Origins guy

Answer 5

Your "drunk as a skunk" because skunks have very poor eye sight and have a tendency to bum into things and wander around aimlessly. Nonetheless, I do know that some birds get drunk. In the spring they eat berries that fell the previous fall and have now fermented and they really get drunk.

Answer 6

i've heard of drunk as a skunk before, but i don't really know what the connection is...i guess maybe it's because skunks usually walk in a kind of sorta not straight manner...anyway...i usually here people compare drunks to stool, and not animals...they will say, you are 'sh1tfaced'...

Answer 7

drunk as a skunk - rhymes
p*ssed as a newt - they have a drunken walk
sick as a parrot - dates from when the most commonly available parrots were mostly green and so looked ill.

Snails like to get drunk on beer.

Answer 8

No they compare the behaviour of the person to the normal behaviour of the animal...

or maybe not. Just get drunk and forget about it.

Answer 9

Check out this site,

http://www.ezprezzo.com/index.html

They used to have a clip that showed what happened to jungle animals after eating certain types of fruit at the end of the season. The fruit fermented in their stomachs and they litteraly got P****d. It was hilarious watching the monkey trying to swing through trees only to slam face first into the tree trunk...DOH!

Answer 10

You know I never noticed that lol

We also compare how much we drink to animals...I drunk that much last night it would have made an elephant fall over.

Yea why do we do that lol you set me off on one now.