“Binge (noun): a short period of excessive consumption, especially of food, alcohol, narcotics, etc.” To quote most dictionaries, along with binge the verb – “to engage in such excessive consumption”. Notice what’s missing? Or are you too lost in The Bear (Season 3) to twig?

Truth being, booze and low-value snacks have lost their knee-jerk connection to binge in the past decade. Say the word now and most of us will picture a picture, typically magnified by a 65-inch QLED screen, delivering shows on demand. Dramedy as remedy, reality as therapy – whichever your fix, the verb is at your fingertips. Farewell, beer and pretzels. The new-age binge is all about the optic.

Nine years ago “binge-watch” won Collins Dictionary’s word of the year, edging out those other pastimes “ghosting” and “shaming”. While all three verbs have endured the interim, it’s the sofa stupor of binge-watching that’s become entrenched. As proof, the action has shed its hyphen on some platforms, or ditched its needless tail altogether.

P. G. Wodehouse is deemed the word’s catalyst a century ago. Bertie Wooster, the comical hero, often embarks on binges of the brandy-and-soda kind. Before then the slang was linked to sailors, yet not for reasons you’d suspect. With midland roots the word surfaced in the 1850s, deriving from a Lincolnshire dialect as a verb to soak.

Yet rather than rum as the implicated liquid, sailors binged their leaky hulls in brine, allowing timbers to swell, the hairline cracks to seal. It doesn’t take Shakespeare to draw a line from soggy barques to dockside soaks, the slang slowly seeping into common English, soon boosted by Wooster.

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Fast-forward to 1948 and you’ll find Variety – the Hollywood bible – citing “TV binge” as a phrase, a ritual akin to “marathon viewing” that telethons and sports encouraged throughout the 1950s. Early ’70s, too, before video made its beachhead. As a teen I’d watch all-hour Wimbledon finals, the Borg-McEnroe epics, bingeing beyond witching hour before it was a meme. Call me an early adopter.

Video rocked the landscape, of course, the mainstream shift to time-shift television (as it was known) before our wholesale migration to streaming. Box-sets, too. Breaking Bad in five discs. Hands up who had a TV library, our momentary cargo cult before Blockbuster went bust and Video Ezy turned queasy, allowing Netflix to seduce our eyeballs from 2015.

Followed by Stan, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon, Foxtel, Kayo and finally Binge in 2020, the verb coming full circle. Add catch-up services, plus a home-bound pandemic, and you begin to pity the valour of appointment telly. Binge, as the anagram suggests, has become a way of being. Like Northampton coal barges, we’re soaking in the word.