Q: Oh master, how did the terms nuts and bananas come to refer to something or someone crazy? —Shane Adams
Cecil responds:
How did any word ever come by a new meaning? It’s not like Noah Webster just announced it in the newsletter one week. No, someone tried using an existing word in some novel way, and it stuck. That’s how language evolves, much as it may bug those weirdos who insist that decimate can only mean “kill a tenth of.” In the long centuries of the pre-text-message era, of course, new slang typically made its debut in speech rather than writing, so some developments surely took some time to turn up in the historical record. But from what we can tell, people have been using nuts to mean “crazy” since the mid-19th century; bananas seems to have shown up maybe 100 years later.
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