A Dictionary of Cont..

drove 146
land but is standard in the United States where
it is used interchangeably with drought.
drove. See drive.
drown is a regular verb and the past tense :and the
participle are drowned. In the United States an
extra d is often heard in this word, as in he will
drownd and he was drownded last night. These
were once literary forms but are now considered
as uneducated usage, at least when they appear
in print.
drug. See drag.
drug on the market. What drug? And in what
pharmacopoeia to be found? Or is it a drug at
all? Is it, perhaps, dreg, which is pronounced
drug in some dialects? Or a drugget? Or some
confusion of drag or drogue?
Nobody knows. All the dictionaries can say
is what the phrase makes evident: something
which is no longer in demand, something unsaleable.
Dryden said that virtue shall a drug
become. In a way, it is; and a drag. Sir William
Temple said, in 1763, that horses in Ireland are
a drug. Robinson Crusoe laughed at the coins
he found in the wreck: 0 Drug! said I aloud,
what art thou good for? The term may have
originated in some now-forgotten pun, but however
it originated it is now a clich6, an expression
that we repeat without knowing exactly
what it means. Indeed, it is, perhaps, supreme in
its kind, for there is no evidence, from the
moment of its first appearance in 166 1, that anyone
has ever known exactly what it means.
drug store. The nearest thing to a drug store that
an American will find in England is a chemist’s
shop. They both fill prescriptions and sell medicines,
cosmetics, and sick-room supplies; but the
soda fountains, lunch counters, magazine racks,
and toy and novelty departments that grace and
clutter the drug store are unknown in the: chemist’s
shops.
drunk. See drink.
drunkard; alcoholic; sot. Drunkard is the everyday
word, strongly tinged with the disgust, contempt,
and amusement that drunkenness inspires
in those that have to deal with it (A Man that
is now and then guilty of Intemperance is not
to be called a Drunkard-Steele). Sot, originally
a fool or an idiot, is an angry word for an
habitual drunkard (bursten-bellied sots . . . this
horrid sot . . . who cannot sleep at ni,ght till
dosed with drink). Alcoholic is the newest and
politest term of all, carrying a nobly understanding
connotation of psychological and physiological
illness. It has replaced dipsomaniac,
which used to be the understanding word but
fell short of perfection because of undignified
suggestions in -maniac.
There are so many slang terms for drinking,
drunkenness, and drunkards that almost any
term to be found in a dictionary is comparatively
dignified.
drunk; drunken; inebriated; intoxicated. When applied
to persons, drunk is now the commonest
form in America, both predicate and attributive
(After one more drink he was distinctly drunk.
The drunk soldier was plainly looking for a
quarrel). As applied to persons, drunken now
seems a little archaic and poetic (What shall we
do with a drunken sailor? A drunken man seems
to bear a charmed life), though it is still used to
describe states and actions that pertain to, proceed
from, or are marked by, intoxication (This
drunken babbling amused some but disgusted
most. Weaving through trafic in drunken disregard
of all regulations . . .). (See also drink.)
Inebriated is simply a highfalutin word for
drunk. It is used as a pompous circumlocution
or humorously (as in Disraeli’s famous reference
to Gladstone as a sophistical rhetorician,
inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity).
Intoxicated means poisoned. It was possible
formerly to speak of intoxicated weapons or of
serpents that intoxicated by their bite: and the
word toxic, poisonous, is in everyday use. But
intoxicated, when used literally, now means to
be poisoned by drinking an excess of ethyl
alcohol. Used finurativelv (intoxicated with success,
intoxicatedwith happiness), it means drunk
but carries less censure than the coarser, downright
word. To be drunk with success suggests
just a shade greater likelihood of doing something
offensive or dangerous in one’s elation
than if one were intoxicated with success.
dry goods, textile fabrics and related articles of
trade, in distinction from groceries, hardware,
and so on, is now an old-fashioned word in
America, though still current and standard.
There is no equivalent in England. The word
embraces what is there called drapery, mercery,
and haberdashery.
dry out. An American, soaked in a downpour,
wants to dry out his clothes. An Englishman
wants to dry off his. Perhaps the English climate
has made him resign himself to a surface dryness
only.
d.t.‘s must now be accepted, at least in informal
speech and writing, as a standard abbreviation
of delirium tremens.
dual words. Modern English has only two forms
to indicate whether a word is being used in
reference to one thing or to more than one:
the singular, showing one, and the plural, showing
more than one. Some primitive languages
have grammatical forms for one, two, three, and
more than three things. Old English, like Greek,
had forms to indicate one, two, and more than
two. There still are in modern English a few
words, such as neither, alternative, both, the
latter, that carry a dual meaning to some extent,
that is, that seem to refer to two rather than to
more than one.
The tendency in modern English is to free
these words from the specific reference to two.
Neither, for example, was used broadly as early
as the seventeenth century, as seen in neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature. In the nineteenth century, Gladstone
felt at liberty to say: my decided preference is
for the fourth and last of these alternatives. Not