Pompette and more French words for being tipsy

One topic of conversation or linguistic education not really touched upon at school in the UK when I was at school, for obvious reasons (pour des raisons évidentes), was the danger of alcohol over-consumption. 

However, growing up, one commonly heard reference was to the French population’s respect for alcohol from an early age. 

We had this image of all French toddlers casually sipping a glass of Malbec at the dinner table from the age of five, as their parents educated them on the importance of savouring taste and appreciating terroir over getting drunk.

While this is an exaggeration, the French approach, we learned, explains why binge-drinking is nowhere near as prevalent in the Hexagone as it is in boozy Britain.

Now, having lived in France for a decade, I can vouch for this fact – you do not see blotto youths stumbling around city centre alleyways to the same extent as in Britain. 

This not to say that the French are not impartial to partying hard on occasion – a nice phrase for those who have over-indulged is ‘charger la mule’ (to overload the mule). This is preferable to the more vulgar ‘être bourré’, which means to have had one’s fill.

Avoir un coup dans le nez (to have a drink/hit in the nose) is an alternative, more casual way of saying that someone is drunk.

However, surely the loveliest word refers to someone being slightly tipsy: pompette. The origin of the word in this context, states the online linguistic resource, Le Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL), is unclear. 

It either derives from être en pompette, meaning ‘to be dressed to the nines’; or from the simple pomper, meaning ‘to drink’. The latter is the most likely, it says.