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roaring

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be a roaring success

To be extremely or triumphantly successful. For having such a limited budget, their play turned out to be a roaring success. My business was a roaring success in the 1980s and '90s, but the advent of the Internet rendered my services obsolete.

See also: roaring, success

*drunk as a lord

 and *drunk as a skunk

very drunk. (*Also: as ~.) After his fifth cocktail, Michael was as drunk as a lord. Judy bought herself a case of beer and proceeded to get as drunk as a skunk.

See also: drunk, lord

rip-roaring

very exciting and successful (always before noun) The show was a rip-roaring success. The car was launched with a rip-roaring publicity campaign.

do a roaring trade

  (British & Australian) also do a roaring business (American)

to sell a lot of goods quickly (usually in continuous tenses) It was a hot day and the ice-cream sellers were doing a roaring trade. (often + in ) The toy department was doing a roaring trade in furry dinosaurs.

See also: roaring, trade

drunk as a lord

Also, drunk as a fiddler or skunk ; falling-down or roaring drunk . Extremely intoxicated, as in He came home drunk as a lord. The three similes have survived numerous others. The first was considered proverbial by the mid-1600s and presumably alludes to the fact that noblemen drank more than commoners (because they could afford to). The fiddler alludes to the practice of plying musicians with alcohol (sometimes instead of pay), whereas skunk, dating from the early 1900s, was undoubtedly chosen for the rhyme. The most graphic variant alludes to someone too drunk to keep his or her balance, as in He couldn't make it up the stairs; be was falling-down drunk. And roaring drunk, alluding to being extremely noisy as well as intoxicated, was first recorded in 1697. Also see dead drunk.

See also: drunk, lord

drunk as a lord

Extremely drunk. Members of the nobility could afford to keep quantities of wine, beer, and liquor on hand, and as much out of envy as stating a fact, the common folk described anyone, titled or not, who had a load on by that phrase. In these more egalitarian times, “drunk as a skunk” and, less elegantly, “shit-faced drunk” have replaced “drunk as a lord.”

See also: drunk, lord