drink [OE] Old English drinc ‘drink’ had a close relative drenc which is the source of drench [OE]. The colloquial phrase the drink referring to the sea, dates from the mid 19th century, but drink like a fish goes back to at least the early 17th when John Fletcher and James Shirley wrote a play called The Night-Walker which contains the line ‘Give me the bottle, I can drink like a Fish now, like an Elephant’. Drunk comes from the past tense of drink. We now use the American drunk as a skunk, but Chaucer describes someone as drunk as a mouse; and drunk as a rat or even a wheelbarrow have been used in the past. Drunkards have been with us since at least the 13th century.