souse

Sometimes you get into the sauce and things go south: you sluice whatever’s in the house into your mouth, you start to get salty, your brain turns to brine, and you’re pickled. In short, you’re soused. Or, to say it another way, you’re a souse.

Now, tell me, those of you on speaking terms with souse: while we all agree that soused means ‘heavily inebriated’, do you use souse to mean ‘a person who is currently heavily inebriated’ or do you use it to mean ‘a person who is habitually inebriated’? In other words, in your usage, is the relation between soused and a souse the same as between drunk and a drunk?

Hmm, well, how about the relation between pickled and a pickle? If something is a pickle, it has been pickled, but, more to the point, it is presented as intrinsically and permanently pickled. It will never be unpickled at any future time you may pick. Pickle is its nature. So calling someone a souse is like calling them a pickle, right?

Hmm, yes and no. First let’s get the order of derivations straight: the noun pickle came before the verb. It’s called pickling because it involves using a pickle. But – trick! trickle! – the original sense of pickle is the brine. The cucumber (or other vegetable) has gotten the name pickle by transference. 

But back to souse: It is a similar situation to pickle in that soused, the participle, derives from souse, the verb, which in turn comes from souse, the noun. So a souse is not so called from being soused, but rather the converse.

It is also a similar situation because soused means, literally, pickled, and a souse is something that has been steeped in brine. Not necessarily a pickled cucumber per se, though – more likely something that’s a sow’s. Or a hog’s. You know, pickled pig’s feet, pickled pig’s ears, that manner of thing. And specifically it’s pickled in a salty brine: souse, you see, comes via French from Proto-Germanic (yes, Proto-Germanic – French has lots of Frankish bits) *sultijō ‘saltwater, brine’, which is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root *sḗh₂l ‘salt’. 

It’s interesting to see that the /s–l/ and then /s–lt/ was preserved for such a long time, only to have the /l/ softened up to /ʊ/ and the /t/ to /s/ to make /saʊs/, sounding as though someone truly sauced were trying to say “salt.” But on the other hand, in the figurative transference, the key component, salt – something that makes you thirsty – has been replaced by a completely different agent, one often used (with variable efficacy) to address thirst: alcohol.