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(From The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Chapter XXIII, published 1892)

Passage 364

“Excuse me one moment, Captain Dobbs. I wish to speak with my mate,” said the captain, whose face had begun to shine and his eyes to sparkle.

“Please yourself,” replied the pilot. “You couldn't think of offering a man a nip, could you? just to brace him up. This kind of thing looks damned inhospitable, and gives a schooner a bad name.”

“I'll talk about that after the anchor's down,” returned Wicks, and he drew Carthew forward. “I say,” he whispered, “here's a fortune.”

“How much do you call that?” asked Carthew.

“I can't put a figure on it yet—I daren't!” said the captain. “We might cruise twenty years and not find the match of it. And suppose another ship came in to-night? Everything's possible! And the difficulty is this Dobbs. He's as drunk as a marine. How can we trust him? We ain't insured—worse luck!”

Is the phrase "as drunk as a marine" common nowadays or is it dated or obsolete?

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  • 1
    More commonplace today is drunk as a skunk.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jan 3 at 23:05
  • 1
    The OED offers, for one: Nautical slang. An incompetent seaman. But I have not investigated this further and thus won’t use the answer box at this time.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Jan 4 at 4:48
  • 1
    I made an Ngram search for as drunk as a lord, a very old expression which is the one most familiar to me (though I don't know if it's still used in drinking circles!). Many of the entries are from dictionaries of slang and the like, but I saw no mention of as drunk as a marine.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jan 4 at 8:59
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    Why is this question downvoted? What's wrong with this question?
    – philphil
    Commented Jan 4 at 14:08
  • 1
    @philphil I assume it's because you have done no research yourself.
    – Greybeard
    Commented Jan 4 at 16:53

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It was somewhat common in the late 19th century. In the 20th century "drunk as a sailor" took its place. But in the past decade the "sailor" version has started to decline while "marine" is increasing. From Google Ngrams

enter image description here

However, as pointed out in the comments, nearly all the hits for "drunk as a marine" are due to this one book: the big jump in the middle is when it was published, the recent upturn is a republishing. So I'd say that the phrase is not really common at all (I've never personally encountered it before this question).

My guess regarding the recent decrease in "drunk as a sailor" is due to political correctness -- it's less acceptable these days to use expressions containing stereotypes. It's just a coincidence that it coincides with the republishing of "The Wrecker".

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  • I think "drunk as a sailor" shouldn't work in this context in English because the characters are all sailors and that would be a kind of pleonasm here.
    – philphil
    Commented Jan 3 at 22:34
  • That doesn't change the answer to your question about how common the phrase is today. Unless you're trying to modernize the dialogue while keeping the setting, the original context is not really relevant.
    – Barmar
    Commented Jan 3 at 22:44
  • A good many of the results for drunk as a Marine are this very quotation from The Wrecker!
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jan 4 at 9:04
  • @KateBunting The publication of The Wrecker in 1892 is precisely why the blue bump starts between 1880 and 1900 (allowing for the smoothing and Google recording errors). Recent out-of-copyright republication of RLS's works (the co-writer Samuel Lloyd Osbourne died in 1947 so The Wrecker's copyright ended in 2017) is why there has been a recovery in the last decade.
    – Henry
    Commented Jan 4 at 13:21
  • Thanks, I've update the answer based on this information.
    – Barmar
    Commented Jan 4 at 16:37

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