how old is this expression?
Where did it come from?
what does it mean, specifically? Is it worse than being tin-foil-hat crazy?
please, please, please, …tell me…before I go, well, bat—t crazy.
No cite but I’d say it was a development from the simple bats meaning crazy, which itself is an abbreviated form of bats in the belfry, ie wrong in the head.
I remember doing this one in the recent past.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=361946&highlight=batshit+crazy from March, 2006. Not as recent as I thought.
My addition to that thread was
.
That, along with our daffy tendency to shoe-horn a vulgar word into an innocent word (abso-fucking-lutely, guaran-damn-tee,) gives you batshit crazy.
Actually, it comes from a classic storyline in *Batman *comics, circa 1970.
Batman investigates a new crime spree in Gotham. He discovers that the criminal underworld are getting their instrustions from a mysterious new Napoleon of crime known as *The Mastermind. * Eventually he discovers that The Mastermind is actually his own BatComputer gone insane. All the bats flying around the BatCave, dropping turds on multi-million dollar equipment have caused a short circuit. Just as you’d expect, really. What the hell was Bruce Wayne thinking putting his base there? Anyway, Robin famously cried out “Holy shit, Batman, the BatComputer has gone BatShit crazy” and thus created the two expressions, holy shit, and *BatShit crazy *at the same time.
I always thought it was because you can get rabies through inhaling bat guano in caves and people with rabies would appear to be crazy. Since it was a crazy caused by batshit, they were batshit crazy.
[sub]Okay, yeah, I really had no idea.[/sub]
Hmmm. Read all this, and samclem’s link, too. I think it comes, instead, from simple observation of bats. When you watch them fly, especially in droves from a nice settlement at sundown, they fly around willy-nilly in wild patterns, seemingly random, but it makes sense with their food source…nocturnal insects.
When bats emerge at dusk, as a colony ,it’s a feeding frenzy, and they don’t fly out as birds, they fly all awhirl and about, kinda crazy. Up and down, loop de loop, and all around, going with their sonar sense in pursuit of all those ADD insects that don’t fly in straight lines neither. That’s the bat part.
The shit part is elaboration.
Batshit Crazy means wildly flailing about.
This makes sense. Though, I’m almost certain Hunter S. Thompson uses both ‘batshit’ and ‘batshit crazy’ in Fear and Loathing on the Capaign Trail '72. He may well have been ahead of the trend though, given his writing style.
And he was discharged from the Army in '58, which I suppose would explain his fondness for the word in the first place…
I don’t care what the “real” answer it, you win.
One blog I read theorizes it’s a mashup of “going apeshit” meaning acting like an upset simian who flings his feces at zoo goers and “going batty” as in having bats in ones belfry.
At least 58. Keenan Wynn’s character in Dr Strangeglove is named Colonel Batguano. It seems that the expression must have been common by 1964 in order for it to be a joke in the movie.
Only slightly related to OP…but something I always got a kick out of.
There is a town in MT named Belfry (at least there was when I was growing up)
Guess what their mascot name for the school was?
I was gonna mention Dr. Strangelove before Loach did. Great minds obviously think alike.
Every film student who’s seen Dr. Strangelove knows that one of the major certifiable nuts in the film is Bat Guano, which is another name for bat shit. Put the two together and you’ve got proof that the term dates back to at least 1958. In fact, it could be this film that invented it! 
Three years ago?:dubious:
Dr. Strangelove appeared in 1964, although the book it was loosely based on Red Alert, appeared in 1958. I assume that Col. Guano was first introduced in the movie. Was such a character in the book?
I’m ahead of my time.
I always thought that batshit and bullshit were chosen because they are especially pungent. I don’t actually know from first hand experience but that’s what I’ve heard - I think. I never got the part about adding crazy to it though, but I like the explanation about it being a military expression.
Actually, his last name is “Guano” and his nickname is “Bat.” Sellers’ great delivery of the line “Colonel [pause] Bat Guano, if that really is your name–” makes the movie.
Good question. I always thought it was connected to rabies, which is associated with bats and craziness.
batty
1580s, “pertaining to bats,” from bat (n.2). Slang sense “nuts, crazy” is attested from 1903, from the expression (to have) bats in (one’s) belfry , also meaning “not right in the head” (1901).
Dictionary.com, “batty,” in Online Etymology Dictionary. Source location: Douglas Harper, Historian. Batty Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: December 05, 2010.
I hypothesize that the word “Batshit” is emblematic of the general coarsening of American speech that occurred during and subsequent to World War II. To my ears, there’s something vaguely effete about “batty”, a connotation that “Batshit” lacks. I suspect that a civilian during the 1940s would not have perceived these 2 words in that way. These developments occurred in parallel to more general trends towards informality, starting near the dawn of the 20th century.
Apologies for the 3+ year delay.