A BOOK celebrating Ireland's slang on a county-by-county basis has just been released and highlights, among other things, a huge vocabulary of adjectives to describe various stages of inebriation.



For Focal Sake is a result of a competition between the 32 counties of Ireland on www. slang. ie and captures the various nuances of our mother tongue. Thousands of entries were submitted and Cork was the outright winner in the number of slang terms submitted.



Mayo, Sligo, Tipperary, Waterford, Dublin, Kilkenny, Offaly, Wexford and Galway were the remaining nine in the top 10 but each county was well represented.



The book contains 32 chapters, one for each county, and includes a profile of the county with songs and nicknames as well as a selection of its slang. It also contains a general Irish slang section with a list of choice words and 15 lessons on how we speak.



Words describing drunkenness are in abundance: 'Blithero, full as a bingo bus, gallybandered, in de baloobas, in de mowldies, in the gizoolies, in schteamed, steamboats, and wrote off ' is just a brief selection.



"This really snowballed. We had over 6,000 entries. I cherrypicked the best ones for the book, " said its creator, Cian Foley.