I know the reason may be the obvious, e.g., someone spotted someone else chowing down on say, bananas, and then acting all freaky, but where do these things come from??? Crackers, bananas, fruity, nutty, flaky, fruitloop, fruitcake, and there’s sure to be some I missed. Please someone help!! This has been making me crackers for years.
A compendium of insults and “not all there” comments from various sources.
Not much help with your problem but gives you an idea of how many ways there is to say you’re an insane idiot.
Hey! come on people, I’m sure someone has an origin on one of these!
Koo-Koo for Coco Puffs…
The year was 1877. Theodore Brinksly was working on the docks, unloading freightliners with goods from around the world. As each item arrived to port, he exclaimed “what’s this?” One of the freightliner crew would shout the item’s given name. “Bananas” Bananas?! Theodore would exclaim. That’s crazy!!! As the strange fruit progressed inland, from New York, to California, one could hear the laughter following the strange new food names. Crackers from England was a particularly silly looking one for old Theodore and has been a favorite ever since.
all right, I admit it, I’m just trying to keep my envelope red until someone addresses my question…
If you didn’t like Theodore’s story, perhaps you’ll like Nurse Elouis Crampton’s.
Nurse Crampton was stationed at the “Shady Glades” assylum for the “sanity-impaired”. She studied under the tight guidance of Headmaster Stalingrad.
Stalingrad was of the firm belief that each patient be addressed with their “food” affliction, rather than the actual clinical diagnosis for their mental instability. He believed that it was detrimental for a patient to ever actually hear the words Psychosis, or Schizophrenia, etc.
He was in the assylum’s cafeteria when he developed the different “food” tags that went with each disease. I’m unable to uncover the correlations between Banana, cracker, etc., but there you have it.
“Bananas” is one of the most recent of these, probably cropping up in the late '60s.
I would guess that it arose from the joke about “smoking bananas,” the UL that scraping the crud from the inside of the peel, drying it out, and smoking it would get one high.
“He’s crazy…he’s been smokin’ bananas…he’s bananas.”
lucyfur, is that the real deal? If it is, I think I can relax now. Thank you!
I would guess that “bananas”, at least, means that the person is acting like a monkey. Dunno about the others, though. Probably, they’re all (or mostly) independent.
My guess is that the ignorant and superstitious people of an earlier era (pre-“Simpsons”) believed that certain foods could drive people insane. Not completely unbelievable when you consider that people once thought yummy tomatoes were poisonous.
From there, it spread to besmirch the good names of other vittles.
V.
I would hazard a guess that this is partially a case of a mode of speech becoming entertaining and trendy.
For example, somebody may have said that somebody was “cracked” (insinuating that his skull – and thus his brain – had been damaged), and this was gradually turned into “crackers”. People picked up on this food reference and started thinking of food words that sounded “funny” to them, like “banana” (the “nanananana” is the “funny” sounding part). Eventually the food/crazy trend became fixed.
This has happened in other ways. A crazy person has been called “One brick short of a load”, “One ace short of a full deck”, and so on. This has mutated into “His elevators don’t go to the top floor” and so on.
It’s just word play. We love doing it.
To give you a time frame for some of them from Merrriam Webster
Main Entry: nuts
Pronunciation: 'n&ts
Function: adjective
Date: 1785
1 : ENTHUSIASTIC, KEEN <everyone seems nuts about it – Lois Long>
2 : INSANE, CRAZY <said that it was a novel and all the people who said otherwise were nuts – Flannery O’Connor>
Main Entry: ba·nan·as
Pronunciation: b&-'na-n&z, esp British -'nä-
Function: adjective
Date: 1968
: CRAZY <go bananas> <drives me bananas>
Main Entry: crack·ers
Pronunciation: 'kra-k&rz
Function: adjective
Etymology: probably cracked + -ers (as in starkers)
Date: 1928
: CRAZY
Main Entry: fruit·cake
Pronunciation: 'früt-"kAk
Function: noun
Date: 1848
1 : a rich cake containing nuts, dried or candied fruits, and spices
2 : NUT 6a
—6 a : a foolish, eccentric, or crazy person b : ENTHUSIAST <a movie nut>
Thank you all for generously answering my inane query.
You’re too kind, gold1. It is a good question, and I don’t think we’ve got close to answering it. I haven’t got a copy here, but has anyone got a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable? Might be a good place to check.
I’ll at least add a WAG: at various times of the year particular creatures get frenzied. “Mad as a March Hare” reflects this. Perhaps the food references come from animal references.
picmr
I’m sure it’s all just wordplay. His head is cracked turns into he’s cracked turns into he’s crackers turns into you’re crackers.
Used in a sentence: “You’re crackers for bumping a 17 year old thread to post that!”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, nut = head (listed from 1846)
So ‘off his nut’ = ‘off his head’= crazy
Hence ‘nutty’ -> ‘as nutty as a fruitcake’ -> ‘a fruitcake’
‘His nut is cracked’ -> ‘cracked’ -> ‘crackers’
Dug out my dusty copy of Brewers:How hard was it to look something up before the internet…
“Crackers” comes from “crack brained” (eccentric, slightly mad) nothing to do with biscuits.
Nothing directly on bananas, but there is an old English word ‘bannan’, from which the word “ban” is derived. Apparently came to mean an ecclesiastical curse or a sense of outlawry.
“Nutty” obviously is connected to the use of “nut” as slang for “head”. “Off his nut” (off his head) came before “nutty”. And then the more illustrative "nutty as a fruit cake > “fruit cake”>Slightly off topic: apparently Connecticut was once known as the “Nutmeg State”, because they allegedly manufactured wooden nutmegs. Does that mean that Connecticuters were called nutters?
Nope. They just drive that way.