Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 16:51:29 -0500 From: "Donald M. Lance" Subject: Re: Rat's -ss > (If so, research needed, unless someone turns up a written treatment.) >Maybe there's a military tie-in, as was suggested on the list last night -- >dictionaries of slang and the like list a lot of miltary expressions that >contain "rat." > >Maybe unrelated (???) is the British expression "rat-arsed," meaning really >drunk, which goes back to around 1980 or so. Where is Barry Popik now that we need him? His informational input far exceeded his personal commentaries, but ads-lers didn't respond to his implicit lexico-dialectal questions as diligently as they have to a couple of emotional items in recent days.