Why pissed as a newt

You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Thread starter Teafrog Start date May 25, Teafrog Senior Member London. What is a fairly common French idiom for this? Saoul comme…? I think this is a very well observed and appropriate idiom: when a newt walk on dry land, it wobbles from side to side as it advances, like a very drunk person.

This amphibian is very sleek in the water, though…. My lovely little slang dictionary offers the following for "pissed as a newt" thanks for that non-American expression!

Teafrog said:. Click to expand Various origins of the expression "pissed as a newt" have been offered:. Sounds like BS to me. In early England, brewers often added meat to the brewing process, which included small animals. Newts, being both terrestrial and aquatic, could survive longer than other animals and would ingest some of the liquid being brewed, giving rise to the expression.

That Abraham Newton of Grantham, the presumed author of the first known treatise on the medicinal properties of the beer of Burton-upon-Trent now unfortunately lost , was such a well-known tippler that, in his lifetime, even Londoners would use the expression "Pissed as Abe Newton.

That it originated in the Victorian era, when professional mourners were called newts, and would therefore have been expected to drown their impersonal sorrows with alcohol. There is no authority that professional mourners were called newts.

That it comes from being too drunk to walk straight, by reference to the natural wobbling gait of a newt. In Nelson's time Royal Navy junior ensign's were known as "newts. All back again.

Re: three sheets to the wind Post by russcable » Sun Jul 04, am trolley wrote And I would note that this appeared in their March, , update their latest and gratest. The rest were from archived sources. Also with up. I'm pissed as a newt. Mason, II. Some of them are pretty glassy-eyed in there.

Jo goes into the kitchen, Stephen into the living-room. To the occupants of the living-room, as he enters. Wine that maketh glad the heart of man! Completely rat-arsed, he was. The pissed-as-a-newt Blur guitarist, who quit the band acrimoniously in , took it into his head to steal a string of sausages from the window of the butcher's shop.

Vertue by Horace Walpole, II. Osbourne, i. Wodehouse, i. Here's another tack for you to try: "drunk as a newt" gets about google hits, and "drunk as a mute" even gets 4. Perhaps you're only finding "pissed as a newt" later because "pissed" only became really popular later. Just an idea. Re: pissed as a newt Post by Phil White » Sun Jul 04, am Here's an annoying, tantalizing quote for you: Thou art both as drunk and as mute as a fish.

William Congreve, The Way of the World,