shickered

Shickered is the English adjectival form of shicker, the Australian term for alcohol borrowed from Yiddish shiker. To be shickered is to be drunk, thoroughly so, without ambiguity. The word wears its Yiddish ancestry in its spelling but is spoken today by Australians with no knowledge of its origin in the biblical Hebrew root שָׁכַר (shakar), which gave the rabbis שִׁכּוֹר (shikkor) and the Ashkenazi Jews their cautionary noun for the village drunkard.

The -ed suffix is English workmanship applied to a Yiddish loan. When Jewish immigrants to Australia in the 1850s and 1860s brought shiker into colonial vernacular, the language needed a predicate adjective. Shickered filled that role by the 1880s, appearing in goldfields literature and newspaper columns as a plain synonym for drunk. The process is typical of how Australian English absorbed foreign words and gave them English grammar.

By the early twentieth century, shickered had detached from its Yiddish context entirely. C.J. Dennis used it in his 1915 verse novel The Sentimental Bloke, cementing its place in the literary record of Australian slang. Dennis's larrikin hero speaks in a dialect thick with borrowed words, and shickered sits alongside terms from Irish, Cockney, and Pacific Pidgin without any sense of foreignness. The word had completed its naturalization.

Shickered is now the more common form in Australian English, heard more often than shicker as a standalone noun. It functions as a plain adjective: he came home shickered, they were absolutely shickered by nine. The biblical gravity of the original, its associations with Noah's tent and the Proverbs warnings, is entirely absent. The word has traveled from Jerusalem to Melbourne with one meaning intact and everything else stripped away.