Our Schnapsdrossel (WoM for March) needs a drinking companion,
and here he is. A Schluck is a gulp or swig (from schlucken -
"to swallow"), and a Specht is a woodpecker. Put the two
together and you have another moniker for a boozer or drunk.
Again, I do not know how the word originatedperhaps the
alliteration of the two components (the S in Specht is
pronounced like English "sh") played a role. Addendum
(4/9/2012): According to this theory, the term goes back to
certain woodpecker species that hammer holes into tree trunks in
order to get to the sap. Anyway, we have a word that may look
daunting to foreigners: 11 consonants and only 2 vowels! Things
appear easier when you realize that the "sch", "ck", and "ch"
indicate but one phoneme each, which reduces the number of
effective consonants in the word to 7. Still, for speakers of
languages that avoid consonant clusters (like Japanese) the word
is a challenge. [Source: Wild Things in the German Language:
Kindle version | iBook version] A far-flung Nostratic co