# why food words for insanity? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 19, 2000, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978 "2000-05-19T15:50:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/22 "2017-01-31T16:23:06Z")
> [@gold1](#): > > all right, I admit it, I’m just trying to keep my envelope red until someone addresses my question… 😕 I know he might be gone, but what does this mean? ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/23 "2017-01-31T16:39:27Z")
My WAG: A person’s head is/was sometimes called a coconut. If someone is ‘out of his head’, then he’s ‘off his nut’, or ‘nuts’. I agree with the idea that ‘bananas’ comes from the ‘insane’ behavior of the stereotypical chimpanzee. As for ‘fruitcake’, I think we go from ‘coconut’ (head) to ‘nut’ (head) to ‘nuts’ (‘out of one’s head’ =\> ‘crazy’), and come to ‘nutty as a fruitcake’. So I think ‘fruitcake’ comes from ‘nuts’. Again, these are unsubstantiated guesses. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/24 "2017-01-31T16:56:44Z")
> [@Ukulele\_Ike](#): > > “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.” The “great banana hoax” was 1967. I doubt that’s the connection - I’d be more likely to go with the “acting like a monkey” angle, although somebody quoted a Miriam Webster date of 1968 upstream. I’m not sure of either one - bananas have turned up in various humorous contexts for ages simply because the word SOUNDS funny (and the fruit looks funny and rather phallic). The “Yes, we have no bananas” song was around in the 1920s. It was composed as a novelty song during a banana shortage, but had there been a shortage of, say, apples, the song would have been less likely or would probably not have taken off. ---
**Author:** ![Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blue_blistering_barnacle/32/3386_2.png) [@Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blue_Blistering_Barnacle)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/25 "2017-01-31T19:07:34Z")
> [@Timothy\_Campbell](#): > > 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. The lights are on, but no one’s home. ---
**Author:** ![SigMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@SigMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SigMan)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/26 "2017-01-31T19:22:12Z")
> [@Timothy\_Campbell](#): > > 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. I think that’s the best explanation. We used words that really off the wall to sound funny. I could say that she lost her Bingo card and you’ll probably crack up from it. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Folacin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folacin/32/3195_2.png) [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/27 "2017-01-31T19:38:42Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > > [@gold](#): > > > > all right, I admit it, I’m just trying to keep my envelope red until someone addresses my question… > > 😕 I know he might be gone, but what does this mean? My guess would be that the board software used to display a red envelope for a thread with unread replies. So his post was the equivalent of a ‘bump’. But some old-timer would have to confirm that. ---
**Author:** ![SigMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@SigMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SigMan)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/28 "2017-01-31T19:44:27Z")
17 year old thread? Some of you were just babies then. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/29 "2017-01-31T19:52:57Z")
> [@yabob](#): > > The “great banana hoax” was 1967. I doubt that’s the connection - I’d be more likely to go with the “acting like a monkey” angle, although somebody quoted a Miriam Webster date of 1968 upstream. I was skeptical of the connection at first, but then I tried the Google Ngram viewer and both [“go bananas”](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=go+bananas&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgo%20bananas%3B%2Cc0) and [“he went bananas”](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he+went+bananas&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Che%20went%20bananas%3B%2Cc0) scarcely appear before the late 1960s. Woody Allen’s movie _Bananas_ is from 1971. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2017, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/30 "2017-01-31T23:06:11Z")
I had a look at my [favourite etymological website](http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-ban2.htm)and found the following: > [@](#): > > What of _to go bananas_? It burst upon the world in the 1960s and became a fashionable, not to say faddish, term in the 1970s. Its heyday is over, perhaps thankfully so. But nobody seems to have any very clear idea where it came from. Was the idea of something bent at the root of it, so that a person was being driven mentally out of shape? Or was there a mental image of an over-excited ape clamouring for his daily feast? Or was it a more subtle image connected with the older phrase to _go ape_ or even to _go nuts_? You can go crazy thinking about this stuff. He also remembers, as do I, a derisive use of bananas in the 1970s for corrupt London policemen, on the grounds that they were yellow, bent, and hung around in bunches. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2017, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/31 "2017-02-02T15:20:55Z")
[Holiday Lament (The Fruitcake Song)](http://abackwardsstory.blogspot.com/2011/12/songs-of-season.html) Nobody likes a fruitcake! Nobody likes a fruitcake, We all need therapy. It drives a cake bananas, When a person hates her guts. No wonder all our name has come to mean Someone who’s nuts ---
**Author:** ![BobArrgh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobarrgh/32/2881_2.png) [@BobArrgh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobArrgh)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2017, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/32 "2017-02-02T16:03:58Z")
The red envelope was where someone stored the answer to “14 k …”. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2017, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/33 "2017-02-02T20:21:31Z")
> [@bob\_2](#): > > “Crackers” comes from “crack brained” (eccentric, slightly mad) nothing to do with biscuits. In Victorian times in England, the “-ers” formulation became a common diminutive/humorisation of a root word - so “stark naked” became “starkers” (or “harry starkers”). It’s still sometimes used among groups of male friends to make a nickname out of someone’s regular name. The one association of food to madness that I can think of is one that doesn’t feature in modern slang - mouldy bread and ergotism. ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2017, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978/34 "2017-02-02T22:13:44Z")
Behavioral problems are associated with traumatic brain injuries; so, perhaps, ‘a crack on the head’ might lead to being crackers. Bonkers, too, now that I think about it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-food-words-for-insanity/19978.md?page=1)