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Funnily enough, food is often used metaphorically to describe someone's eccentricity or level of sanity.

We have nuts

  1. Slang. a foolish, silly, or eccentric person. an insane person; psychotic. adj. "crazy," 1846, e.g. to be off one's nut, "be insane," (1860), from earlier be nutts upon "be very fond of" (1785) Meaning "crazy person, crank" is attested from 1903, (British form nutter first attested 1958; nut-case is from 1959)

crackers

adjective 1. (postpositive) ( Brit) a slang word for insane. Also, he was plain crackers [1928+; formed with the British suffix -ers, like bonkers, preggers, etc]

fruity

adjective Eccentric; odd; nutty, weird (1930s+ Teenagers)

fruitcake

Slang. a crazy or eccentric person; meaning "lunatic person" is first attested 1952.

bananas

adj. "crazy," 1968; esp in the phrase go bananas, earlier (1935) it was noted as an underworld slang term for "sexually perverted." Crazy; nuts: I could see that my calm was driving him bananas (1970s+) [from the idiomatic expression] to drive somebody bananas

and cupcake

noun An eccentric person; nutball: regarding puppeteers as kind of weird cupcakes who play with dolls / the publishing cupcake who nailed you on the couch and then fired you (1970s+)

And yet I couldn't come up with any beverages, meat, or vegetables to add to that list. Why are baked "bread" products and fruits more commonly associated with eccentricity or madness? Are there any other foods I can add to this list? Are there any forgotten or archaic food words that describe a person's sanity?

P.S. Please add references/backup/sources with your answers. Thanks!

Source: All definitions taken from Dictionary.com


EDIT: Related to origins of nuts meaning madness is a question entitled
How did the phrase “Are you nuts” come about?

Mari-Lou A
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    'One sandwich short of a picnic', but thats bread again! 'It's all gone pear shape' more fruit! – 7caifyi Oct 24 '14 at 23:31
  • @Christopher It's a good one, but I'm looking for words, not phrases. – Mari-Lou A Oct 24 '14 at 23:32
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  • @Mari-Lou which is why they are comments and not answers. Also struggling with non-fruit and bakery terms: 'Lemon' is all I have so far. – 7caifyi Oct 24 '14 at 23:42
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    There's "dill," which in Australia and New Zealand can mean a fool or an idiot (see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dillweed). Your question is a dilly! Don – rhetorician Oct 25 '14 at 01:34
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    How about a "noodle?" Same dictionary as above defines a noodle as, "a weak, foolish, or stupid person." – rhetorician Oct 25 '14 at 01:48
  • Then there's fruitloop, meaning a crazy person (see Green, Jonathon (2006). Cassell's Dictionary of Slang. Sterling Publishing, ISBN 0-304-36636-6, p.549. ISBN 978-0-304-36636-1) – rhetorician Oct 25 '14 at 02:06
  • I think the breads go with being baked. This is hot; heatstroke, dementia associated. – SrJoven Oct 25 '14 at 02:39
  • Just a word of caution: calling someone fruity, round here, would *not* be describing him as insane. – Dan Bron Oct 25 '14 at 09:00
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    With nuts, I think there's an association with being cracked, not whole, something not all together. – SrJoven Oct 25 '14 at 11:31
  • If "nut" or "nuts" has anything to do with the fruit nut – rogermue Oct 25 '14 at 17:29
  • Whether "nut" or "nuts" has anything to do with the fruit nut is very doubtful. Etymonline's view is very speculative. "nuts" might be a transformation of Latin demens/dementis, in English demented. I would consider it possible that "..ment.s" as something incomprehensible was transformed into something familiar: nuts. Of course, this is a hypothesis, but it would have more logic than the explanations of Etymonline. Yet the silly thing is that such drastic transformations are impossible to verify. – rogermue Oct 25 '14 at 17:41
  • @rogermue nuts are fruit, they are typically called dried fruits. It's a fact that nuts, nutty, a nutter, and nutcase all express the idea of somebody's mental instability. Nut is also slang for head, the shell of a nut is hard just like the bone that covers our brains, but inside there is the "soft" meats/fruits. – Mari-Lou A Oct 25 '14 at 17:45
  • Well, that's the usual explanation because one assumes that the word was always nuts. Nobody takes into consideration that the word originally may have had a totatally different source, simply because changes of the word shape can't be verified by older instances of the word nut/nuts. Transformations can only be found intuitively and have to be taken into consideration when etymological explanations seem to be a bit funny as in "in my neck of the woods" (AmE) or American "fresh" for insolent. – rogermue Oct 25 '14 at 17:59
  • So @rogermue you're saying that the term nut, meaning madness, is unrelated to the actual dried fruit? Mente, in Italian refers to mind, mentale is "mental" and mentalmente is "mentally". Fuori di mente literally means "to be out of the/your mind", which is incidentally also an English idiom, but it tends to mean "to worry". Nut, on the other hand, is noce in Italian and there are no expressions or slang terms that uses noce (that I know of) for madness. – Mari-Lou A Oct 25 '14 at 18:06
  • You misunderstand me. I suspect that "nuts" comes from Latin demens/dementis and was drastically transformed till it became nuts. Such things happen in language. – rogermue Oct 25 '14 at 18:11
  • Crazy as a fox, bats in the belfry, batty, batshit crazy, loopy, has a screw loose, cuckoo. There are all sorts of metaphors for crazy (for anything really). There may well be a pattern but as you can see there are lots of non-animal phrases. So any answer to 'why' will have to take the variety into account. – Mitch Oct 25 '14 at 21:56
  • @Mitch I'm well aware there are many other slang terms to express insanity, I was merely pleasantly puzzled by the fact that fruit and "cakes" were used to the exclusion of vegetables, drinks, dairy products or meats. Ermanen's answer makes sense of this seemingly bizarre coincidence. – Mari-Lou A Oct 25 '14 at 22:10
  • @Mari-LouA connecting crazy and fruit/cakes but not vegetables/drinks/meat would make sense if there were other metaphors that -do- connect with vegetables/drinks/meat but not fruit/cakes. – Mitch Oct 26 '14 at 01:59
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    Despite its futility & irrelevancy (beyond the extent that “insane”&“foolish” are related) you might enjoy this: Over the years, my French wife has used many foods to describe the level of my (in)sanity & foolishness so I translated them foolishly thinking that I'd find AT LEAST ONE English exception to your COOL observation concerning MEAT(andouille) /VEGETABLE(patate)/BEVERAGE(none, even in French, came to mind), BUT TO NO AVAIL, so congratulations & upvote for that! (potato-head, which led to meathead/saphead, don’t count ‘cause not the food themselves..ahh but what about “sap” all alone?) – Papa Poule Oct 27 '14 at 22:40
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    @PapaPoule I'm so pleased my question tickled your fancy. :) – Mari-Lou A Oct 28 '14 at 05:18
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    At the risk of seeming foolishly literal, I note that good fruitcakes have (by volume) a lot of nuts (pecans, in the case of the commercially produced fancy fruitcakes made in central Texas) in them. When as a child I heard the expression "nutty as a fruitcake," I always imagined that it referred to the nuttiness of fruitcakes, with a play on the word nutty. In retrospect, I still don't think that the people who used the phrase in my presence included fruitcake in the simile as a sly comment on or imputation about the sexual preferences of the person described as "nutty as a fruitcake." – Sven Yargs Feb 07 '15 at 00:11
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    Related. @SvenYargs Nuttier than a fruitcake may be slightly safer than fruitier than a nutcake, but nothing seems safe in this day and age, for surely someone somewhere will someday choose to be offended by imagining such a “heteronormative” allusion as you mention. Crazy as a coot might be seen as ageist (despite John Skleton’s use of 1529: “the mad coote, with a balde face to toote”). Crazy as a loon risks offending the institutionalized or merely non-neurotypical. Mad as a hatter risks offending milliners. No simile is safe. :) – tchrist Sep 23 '23 at 21:23

1 Answers1

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The reason why many fruit-related terms are associated with craziness is that most of these slang terms were previously related to homosexuality. In the early 20th century homosexuality was considered a mental illness, as a result this led to a shift in meaning that continued until the 1960s.

By the 1930s both fruit and fruitcake terms are seen as not only negative but also to mean male homosexual, although probably not universally. It should be noted that LGBT people were widely diagnosed as diseased with the potential for being cured, thus were regularly "treated" with castration, lobotomies, pudic nerve surgery, and electroshock treatment so transferring the meaning of fruitcake, nutty, to someone who is deemed insane, or crazy, may have seemed rational at the time and many apparently believed that LGBT people were mentally unsound. In the United States, psychiatric institutions ("mental hospitals") where many of these procedures were carried out were called fruitcake factories while in 1960s Australia they were called fruit factories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_%28slang%29

Homosexuality was associated with fruits because of the effeminacy of homosexuals, thus softness. Fruits are soft also and there you go. You can refer to Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (By Jonathon Green) for the origins of fruit-themed slang terms with connotations of homosexuality:

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As you can see below, fruitcake had the meaning of eccentric person first but gained the meaning of crazy in US slang after gaining the connotation of homosexual man. It must be the craziest food because it contains both fruits and nuts. Hence, you can define the craziest person as "nutty as a fruitcake" and even "nuttier than a fruitcake".

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Banana also meant homosexual in the past:

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But the phrase go bananas is said to be originated from zoos. Monkeys in the zoo go wild when they see bananas coming. Below is excerpt from the book Food: A Dictionary of Literal and Nonliteral Terms (By Robert Allen Palmatier):

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Cupcake is not necessarily related to fruits but it connoted homosexuality also in the 1970s:

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Though, in the case of "nuts", people were actually crazy for the food and the food became crazy. People were nuts about nuts.

In the late 19th century, the British used "nuts" as slang for something they found enjoyable: (This usage may have originated in an old cliché—"sweet as a nut.") Being nuts on something meant you really liked it, but so did being "crazy on something." It's possible that "nuts" became a synonym for "crazy" because of this similarity.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2006/04/what_makes_nuts_so_crazy.html

Crackers is a bit different and trickier though. It seems it is derived from cracked and it shares the same meaning with other similar terms: crackerbarrel, cracko, cracky:

cracked adj. 1. [17C+] insane, crazy, eccentric; thus cracked about/on, obsessed with, infatuated with (cf. CRACKED IN THE FILBERT phr.; CRACKERBARREL adj.; crackers adj.; cracko adj.; cracky adj.).

It might be associated with mental breakdown and thus, falling to pieces. It seems it shares the same or similar roots with craze:

From Middle English crasen (“to crush, break, break to pieces, shatter, craze”), from Old Norse *krasa (“to shatter”). Cognate with Danish krase (“to crack, crackle”), Swedish krasa (“to crack, crackle”), Norwegian krasa (“to shatter, crush”), Icelandic krasa (“to crackle”).

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/craze

Etymonline says that it is still used in its original sense in crazy quilt:

Original sense preserved in crazy quilt pattern and in reference to cracking in pottery glazing (1815). Mental sense (by 1620s) perhaps comes via transferred sense of "be diseased or deformed" (mid-15c.), or it might be an image.

It is used in the phrase drive someone crackers also. Below is excerpt from the book Food: A Dictionary of Literal and Nonliteral Terms (By Robert Allen Palmatier):

enter image description here

Mari-Lou A
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