Fun with slang

From the Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict a Riot: Oh, watchin' the people get lairy / it's not very pretty, I tell thee / Walkin' through town is quite scary / and not very sensible either...

As is fairly clear from the context of the song, the Brits use "lairy" to mean someone who is being somewhat noisy and a bit abusive...this almost always means someone who has been drinking.

However, the word appears to have older roots in Australia: "Lairy is widely used in Australia to mean either 'flashily dressed, showy' or 'socially unacceptable'. Lairy is thought to have come into Australian English around the end of the nineteenth century from the British slang term leery, meaning 'wide awake, knowing, sharp, streetwise'."

Anyway, just a random fact of the day.