Hast spent the livelong night
In smoking Esculapios,—in getting jolly tight?
Poem before Iadma, 1850.
He clenched his fist as fain for fight,
Sank back, and gently murmured "tight."
MS. Poem, W.F. Allen, 1848.
While fathers, are bursting with rage and spite,
And old ladies vow that the students are tight.
Yale Gallinipper, Nov. 1848.
Speaking of the word "drunk," the Burlington Sentinel remarks: "The last synonyme that we have observed is 'tight,' a term, it strikes us, rather inappropriate, since a 'tight' man, in the cant use of the word, is almost always a 'loose character.' We give a list of a few of the various words and phrases which have been in use, at one time or another, to signify some stage of inebriation: Over the bay, half seas over, hot, high, corned, cut, cocked, shaved, disguised, jammed, damaged, sleepy, tired, discouraged, snuffy, whipped, how come ye so, breezy, smoked, top-heavy, fuddled, groggy, tipsy, smashed, swipy, slewed, cronk, salted down, how fare ye, on the lee lurch, all sails set, three sheets in the wind, well under way, battered, blowing, snubbed, sawed, boosy, bruised, screwed, soaked, comfortable, stimulated, jug-steamed, tangle-legged, fogmatic, blue-eyed, a passenger in the Cape Ann stage, striped, faint, shot in the neck, bamboozled, weak-jointed, got a brick in his hat, got a turkey on his back."
Dr. Franklin, in speaking of the intemperate drinker, says, he will never, or seldom, allow that he is drunk; he may be "boosy, cosey, foxed, merry, mellow, fuddled, groatable, confoundedly cut, may see two moons, be among the Philistines, in a very good humor, have been in the sun, is a little feverish, pretty well entered, &c., but never drunk."
A highly entertaining list of the phrases which the Germans employ "to clothe in a tolerable garb of decorum that dreamy condition into which Bacchus frequently throws his votaries," is given in Howitt's Student Life of Germany, Am. ed., pp. 296, 297.
See SPRUNG.
2. At Williams College, this word is sometimes used as an exclamation; e.g. "O tight!"
TIGHT FIT. At the University of Vermont, a good joke is denominated by the students a tight fit, and the jokee is said to be "hard up."
TILE. A hat. Evidently suggested by the meaning of the word, a covering for the roof of buildings.