Street voices
Hugues
·
United States
"Shitfaced, meaning incredibly drunk. Alternatively, you can also say wasted. Whew, what's got you all drowsy this morning? Oh man, you have no idea. Last night I went to a party and got completely shitfaced."
What it means
Means absolutely plastered, way past tipsy and deep in the blurry chaos zone. It is a rude, very casual way to say someone got extremely drunk, usually with a bit of disbelief or judgment baked in. You would not use it in polite company unless polite company has already had six tequilas and lost all standards.
Usage examples
"Bro turned up to brunch wearing one shoe and asking the waiter for ibuprofen. He got properly shitfaced at Javi's birthday, no contest."
"My uncle got absolutely shitfaced at my cousin’s wedding in Santa Monica last weekend, three pisco sours, four glasses of red wine and a single tequila shot during the cake-cutting ceremony, and the bride’s father had to drive him back to the hotel in his own rental car at half past midnight."
"The frat boys on the next table at the steakhouse near the airport in Dallas were already shitfaced before our family of six had ordered the appetiser plate, two pitchers of Lone Star down at six in the evening and a karaoke machine being set up by the manager at the corner of the room."
Where it comes from
Shitfaced is American military slang from the Vietnam War era of the late nineteen-sixties, where soldiers used the term to describe the worst stage of drinking after a long furlough. The expression is a contraction of the older drunk-face or boozed-up face, with the intensifier shit- adding the gravity of the loss of dignity. The word entered civilian American English through the films and novels of the post-Vietnam era and crossed the Atlantic in the eighties via Hollywood blockbusters. British and Irish English adopted the term in the nineteen-nineties, though both prefer the local equivalents plastered, hammered or wrecked for the same condition.
Other ways to say it
Editors of this term
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