The Word

Wacky as a Wensleydale?

By Jan Freeman, the Boston Globe

IT'S BEEN A CRAZY news week, vocabularywise--not to mention wild, nuts, and bananas--thanks to Seymour Hersh. His New Yorker article about secret US plans to nuke Iran before it can nuke others launched the barrage of ''barmy" accusations, quoting sources who called the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his government ''nuts" and ''nutcases."

Article Tools

Jack Straw, the British secretary of defense, promptly told the BBC it was Hersh's story that was ''completely nuts"; the United States, he assured the audience, was still committed to diplomacy. In the retelling, his ''nuts" has been taken as a description not of the news report but of anyone who entertains the notion of bombing Iran, including President Bush, and apparently he's OK with that broader interpretation as well.

(Why does ''nuts" mean ''insane," you may ask? It turns out there's no simple answer; both nut meaning ''noggin" and nuts meaning ''obsessed with" may contribute to the current slang senses, says Daniel Engber in a piece at Slate.com.)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was more circumspect in his dismissal of the nuke-Iran story: ''It is just simply not useful to get into fantasy land." (The New York Times, among others, writes fantasy land as two words, but most newspapers, with the blessing of current dictionaries, go with the Disneyesque fantasyland.)

And the president, at an appearance on Monday, chose ''wild speculation" as a summary of Hersh's reporting. Speculation is not all wild, of course: In its 400 years in the language, the word has meant ''vision," ''stargazing," ''deep study," and ''abstract reasoning." But eventually it acquired the weaker sense of ''conjecture," as well as an association with risky investments, and today speculation has a slightly fishy smell, even when it's not described as ''wild."

(I could swear I also heard a radio clip of Bush calling the report ''crazy talk," but maybe I was in fantasyland; the quote shows up on two websites, but not, so far, in any print media. Maybe everyone agreed that ''wild speculation" was the more presidential sound bite.)

Hersh himself, in a follow-up radio interview, got right back to slang basics: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, he said, thought having nukes on the table was ''wacko." But Maureen Dowd took the crazy-talk fruitcake with her Wednesday Times column, which described the administration as ''down the rabbit hole," the vice president as ''bananas," and the Iranian president ''mad as cheese."

''Mad as cheese"? We know cheeseheads, big cheese, and cheese it, the cops!--but when did cheese go crazy?

A decade or so ago, it seems, in the home of Cheshire and Caerphilly. It's British slang, already so widespread that Hallmark has a line of greeting cards called Mad as Cheese. Michael Quinion, on his website World Wide Words, www.worldwidewords.org, asks ''why cheese should be less sane than any other comestible," but notes that logic is not a requirement for such expressions; he offers ''mad as a pink balloon, mad as a box of frogs, and that old Northern standby, daft as a brush" as proof.

Americans have adopted the Brits' mad as a hatter and mad as a March hare, but our mad more often means ''angry," as in mad as a hornet/wet hen/the dickens. (And if your teachers say using mad for ''angry" is wrong, tell them they're bonkers; it's been in the language for 700 years now.)

We've only begun to deploy the domestic arsenal of nutspeak, of course; we've got loony, berserk, psycho, deranged, and unhinged in reserve. But if the hostilities escalate, the British, as usual, will lend us a hand, or an insult. Are we ready for mad as cheese?

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE: June Casagrande, author of ''Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies" (Penguin, $14), casts herself as a linguistic freedom fighter, out to topple the usage elitists who tyrannize nice normal people. It's a worthy cause, but she should have done a few more basic drills before strapping on her bandolier; she thinks till is short for until, mistakes an adverb for an adjective, and calls the predicate nominative (the she in ''this is she") the object of the verb. Worse, when the going gets tough she often surrenders, joining the snob faction on issues like the placement of ''only," the propriety of ''I'm done," and (the fakest rule of all) limiting which to nonrestrictive clauses. Casagrande's a comedian on the side, and she does deliver some laughs; just don't believe everything you read.

(c) 2005 The Boston Globe