Origins

Crazy for You

by S. D. Liddiard

"You're crazy as a coot," said my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman in his twilight years.

"Am not," I replied. I knew my neighbour was far too sophisticated to rise to this bait by responding, "Are too," but I was still childish enough to try.

"There's no way you can pass off that contraption as a birdhouse. And if your better half finds out you've used her colander, she'll have your guts for garters."

"It’s not a birdhouse — it’s folk art. And how would she find out anyway?" I eyed him accusingly. "Surely you’re not loony enough to rat me out."

He smiled coyly. "I’m as crazy as a loon and as mad as a hatter."

"Okay, okay, what have you got planned and what is it going to cost me to bribe you not to do it?"

"Absolutely nothing."

He paused until he could see I was about to ask another question, then continued. "There’s nothing you could bribe me with." At this he began laughing so hard he could barely continue standing. Mad as a March hare, I thought to myself.

After dinner that evening, as my companion and I sat digesting our meal and listening to the radio, she turned to me and said, "I had the strangest conversation with the old guy next door. He came over this afternoon while you were out at the hardware store and asked to borrow our colander." I looked up at her slowly. "So I told him we don’t have a colander, but I thought I might have borrowed one from his wife about six months ago. Then I went and checked, but I guess I must have returned it, because it wasn’t in the cupboard."

"When I got back from looking for it, he was madder than a wet hen. He was hopping around and muttering under his breath. He didn’t say a word, he just stormed out and slammed the door."

Now it was my turn to laugh. This turn of events really hit my funny bone.

Mad originally meant only insane or demented, but has come to mean very angry as well, probably because a very angry person is frequently capable of incomprehensibly irrational acts. Such anger can indeed be characterized as a type of insanity.

The word crazy originally meant full of cracks or flaws, damaged, or impaired. By analogy, it came to mean demented or mentally unstable. Today, this word is used as often to mean wildly enthusiastic.

The name coot has been applied to various swimming and diving birds for centuries. In the United States, it is most often applied to Fulica Americana, a bird known for its particularly stupid appearance and clownish behaviour, from which we get crazy as a coot. This expression has been in use since the early 19th century.

The term loony is shortened from lunatic (from the Latin for moon), which originally applied to a kind of mental illness thought to have recurring periods dependent on the phases of the moon. The term has been used in its shortened form since the 1870s. Lunatic has been in use since the 13th century. It is a synonym for crazy, and is used in the same ways.

The haunting, tremulous call of the common loon (Colymbus glacialis) resembles the mirthless laugh of a crazy person. The expression crazy as a loon is used to describe seriously disturbed persons and has probably been in use for almost as long as English has been spoken in North America.

The expression mad as a hatter entered the language at least as early at 1837, nearly 30 years before Lewis Carroll used it in Alice in Wonderland. In 19th century England, felt hats were stiffened with mercuric nitrate. After years of exposure to this compound, English hatters developed what we now call Minimata disease, or chronic mercury poisoning. The symptoms include uncontrollable twitching, a lurching gait, and incoherent speech.

The phrase mad as a March hare also antedates its use in Alice in Wonderland. In England, certain hares mate in March. At this time, the male of the species sometimes leaps about with wild abandon.

Mad as a wet hen is an Americanism that derives from the behaviour of a chicken that has found its way into a river or lake. Because chickens cannot swim and do not fly well, their efforts to extricate themselves can best be described as furious.

The term funny bone (also once called the crazy bone) seems to have arisen out of a pun. The medial condyle of the humerus, the enlarged knob on the end of the bone of the upper arm, has an unpadded nerve that when struck, feels odd rather than painful. The first known appearance of this term was in an 1840 poem by the Reverend Richard Harris Barham, a writer well known for his puns (e.g., humorous for humerus). The use of this term has since been extended inappropriately to mean the physical embodiment of a sense of humour.

S. D. Liddiard received a bachelor’s degree in psychology before deciding to address his own psychological problems by writing, among other pastimes.