Swedish expressions: ‘Drunk as a jackdaw’

In English, we have vivid sayings such as ‘pissed as a fart’, ‘drunk as a skunk’ and ‘pissed as a newt’. In Sweden, one of the expressions to describe an intoxicated person is ‘drunk as a jackdaw‘ (Swedish: full som en alika). It might seem odd, but there is an explanation.

The most popular theory has to do with the small breweries that populated the Swedish countryside in the past. At the end of the brewing process, the brewers would through the unusable remnants out into the yard. This meant that there were attractive piles of sweet mush distributed all over the countryside. The local jackdaws were rather partial to this mashy, mushy goo, and they would swoop down to eat it. While getting food in themselves, they also imbibed alcohol, and after a while, they would stagger away across the yard in blissed inebriation. The local population of course loved this, and coined the phrase ‘drunk as an jackdaw’.

In Swedish, there is another expression for being a drunk, this time in a noun form – ‘fyllekaja’ – which also means ‘drunk jackdaw’. The word ‘kaja’ is the word for jackdaw in most of Sweden. ‘Alika’ is a regional word used mostly in the southern counties.