Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
drunk (n., past particip.), drunken (adj.)
The noun drunk has two Standard uses: to refer to a person overcome by drink (His mother is a drunk, a real alcoholic), and to refer to a bout of drinking, a spree (She keeps going off on three-day drunks). The latter sense is for Conversational, Informal, or Semiformal use only.
Drunk is also the Standard past participle of drink (She had drunk her coffee) and is sometimes seen as a past tense in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. In all but one situation, drunk appears only as a predicate adjective (She is drunk; He looks drunk), and drunken is used as an attributive adjective (He walked with a drunken weave; A drunken stupor gripped her). The exception: anything having to do with drivers and driving will take drunk as well as drunken as an attributive: He was arrested for drunk [drunken] driving. Her car was wrecked by a drunk [drunken] driver. Headline writers seeking shorter words, plus the recent deluge of slogans used in campaigns against drunk drivers and drunk driving and the legal definitions of driving while drunk or drunk driving, seem to have caused this exception. All the examples above are Standard, although some purists claim to see a semantic distinction between a drunken driver (one who has been drinking excessively) and a drunk driver (one who is guilty of breaking a law). Both drunk and drunken appear in the adjunct position (a drunk person, a drunken person), but drunk, not drunken, is the usual predicate adjective.
The idea of drunkenness appears to have fascinated us always: we have more slang, Conversational, cant, and argot terms for drinking, for the symptoms of being drunk, for drunkenness, and for drunks themselves than for almost any other condition we can get ourselves into. Among Standard synonyms are intoxicated (a rather upright, technical, or even pretentious word, one that preaches etymologically about poison), inebriated (another euphemism, and a pompous one at that), plus a wide range of adjectives of all sorts, descriptive of the various symptoms of drunkenness.
