Leafing through my old Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs I was amused to read the ‘drunk as’ similitudes.

Drunk as a beggar, drunk as a fiddler, drunk as a fish, as drunk as a lord (that one’s still going strong!), drunk as a mouse, as drunk as David’s sow (I’m flummoxed by that one, a biblical allusion, I guess, any thoughts?)

The icing on the cake for me though was this one:

As drunk as a wheelbarrow. (1678, RAY, A Collection of English Proverbs)

I’m not even going to begin working that one out! Any modern ‘drunk’ similes?

I’ve heard drunk as a skunk.  Probably just for the rhyme.

Here’s one story for David’s sow.

Defendant: I was drunk as a judge when I committed the offense.

Judge: The expression is “sober as a judge”. Don’t you mean “drunk as a lord”?

Defendant: Yes, my lord.

(from “Take our Word for It” article on “drunk as a skunk")

Well, replacing “drunk” with “pissed” often brings a slur on the sobriety of newts.
And as a standalone, “ratted” is often heard.  Maybe relates to “...as a mouse”!

I think ‘ratted’ comes from ‘ratarsed’

On a slightly different note one of my favourites from a friend of mine is ‘mad as toast’

I seem to recall “pissed as a coot” from my rowing club days in England some 50 years ago.

Another one: as drunk as sin, or sometimes as drunk as sin itself. Then there’s pissed as a fart, which, upon google-checking, I find has the wonderful variant, as pissed as a fart in a vacuum-cleaner.

Drunk as a handcart.  (From a Cornish dialect glossary).

Marvellous, Eliza! That ties in with the wheelbarrow. I still can’t see the thinking behind the two, but then logic and language have ever been at daggers drawn.

One wonders what Judy would say to all this.

“Boiled as an owl” has long been one of my favorite expressions for indicating drunkenness.

I recall being regaled with the tale of a “topping out” party where the Clerk of Works became so drunk that he was taken from the site to a waiting taxi in a wheelbarrow. (When he got home his wife refused to let him in the house and he spent the remainder of the night asleep in the garden).  Perhaps this was a more common use of wheelbarrows in more agricultural days.

One wonders what Judy would say to all this.

Dr. T, your memory never ceases to astonish me.

Edit: Woo-hoo, got my third box!

Regarding bayard’s remarks about wheelbarrows, I’m reminded of a line from The Lord of the Rings, about the aftermath of Bilbo’s combination 111th birthday and farewell party: “Gardeners came by arrangement, and removed in wheel-barrows those that had inadvertently remained behind.”

Having spent a summer doing cleanup on a construction crew, the drunk as a wheelbarrow thing makes sense to me. Pushing a wheelbarrow in anything resembling a straight line requires that it be loaded symmetrically (almost impossible when one is hauling sheetrock scrap) and that the surface you’re traversing is flat (not your typical torn up jobsite). I made many a wheelbarrow trip that resembled the walk of a drunken sailor.

I always heard “drunk as a sailor,” but when I placed that phrase in phrases.org.uk, I was surprised by no direct matches.

Maybe the phrase refers directly to my father’s time in the Navy!

It gets a lot of hits on Google.

Edit: I don’t know why that links to Google’s main site, since I linked to http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=“drunk+as+a+sailor"&meta=