Three sheets in the wind
photo credit: “Wasted” by Rodrigo Tejeda(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)Definition: (adjective phrase) very drunk
Example: Marie, who was three sheets in the wind, did her best to hang up the laundry to dry, but she kept dropping the clothes pins, and most of it blew away.
Quote:
“He talked a great deal about propriety and steadiness, and gave good advice to the youngsters and Kanakas, but seldom went up to the town without coming down "three sheets in the wind."
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. in Two Years before the Mast
If you’re not a sailor, you could be forgiven for thinking that the three sheets in this phrase represent full sails in a strong wind, threatening to tip the boat over—just as someone who is too drunk is in danger of tipping over.
However, a sheet is actually a rope that is attached to the corner of the sail and used to control it. Sails can be hard to control as shown in the image below, in which three sailors are pulling together on the mainsheet (connected to the boom of the mainsail with a pulley).
photo credit: “MM Mainsheet on” by Beau Vrolyk CC-BY-2.0)So what happens if no one is controlling the sheet? Well, if the sheet is “in the wind,” the sails flap around and the boat lurches uncontrolled like a drunkard walking home from the pub.
There are a number of related phrases, most notably the synonym “three sheets to the wind.” In others, the degree of drunkenness is correlated to the number of sheets that are loose. For instance, in 1862 (twenty-two years after the Dana book quoted above), Anthony Trollope wrote, “Though Snow père might be a thought tipsy—a sheet or so in the wind, as folks say, he was not more tipsy than was customary with him, and knew pretty well what he was about,“ in the novel Orley Farm.
Interested in more synonyms for drunk? Check out our column on loaded!A. C. Kemp | June 30, 2021
