Puke, throw up, hurl, spew, blow chunks, ralph, retch, pray to the porcelain throne, barf, heave, toss one’s cookies.
I could be forgetting some and there may be more colloquial terms I’m not familiar with. But among the list of slang I found on a website for ESL students, many words were either associated with eating, getting drunk, or vomiting. Does that say something about American culture? Probably. I know I frequently remind my students in America Club that Americans love to eat and use every holiday they can as an excuse to overindulge, so it should come as no surprise that we have words like“chow” and “nosh” and “grub” and “scarf down.”
Unfortunately, as I can attest solely from my Peace Corps experience let alone what I already knew before then, Americans also have an unhealthy attitude toward drinking. They, like their northern European counterparts, drink with the intention of getting drunk (unlike other cultures that manage to drink in moderation) and we have the vocabulary to prove it. Wasted, plastered, shit-faced, bombed, trashed, tanked, three-sheets to the wind, buzzed, and smashed are all words people use to brag about their drinking exploits. In addition to slang for the state of drunkenness there’s slang for other alcohol related things like throwing a“kegger” or ordering your drink “on the
rocks.” So it really should come as no surprise that with all that eating and drinking, there’s lots of vomiting to follow and lots of words used to describe it. Plus, when it’s all over there’s always “the hair of the dog that bit you.”