To students of historical slang, or many others of a certain age, the use of bananas as a homophobic slur may recall a similar but broader 20th-century term that’s now vanished: fruit. And in a 1935 glossary of criminals’ patois called The Underworld Speaks, “He’s bananas” is said to mean “He’s sexually perverted a degenerate.” Here the connection to “crazy” is all too plausible, considering that at the time homosexuality was still widely understood to be a mental disorder. Here the OED can reliably get us back only to 1968, when a University of South Dakota publication called Current Slang reported that Kentucky college students (of “both sexes”) were using bananas to mean “excited and upset ‘wild.’” Dan Koeppel, author of the 2008 book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, suggests that “going bananas” might have arisen from the contemporaneous myth that a hallucinogenic effect could be obtained by smoking banana peels (which has been debunked in this column and elsewhere).īanana’s entry in the OED does include two other citations that might be pertinent: In the 1920s “banana oil” was a slang term meaning “nonsense,” which at least looks to be in the ballpark. The story of bananas is a lot shorter and more mysterious. Meanwhile, in what may have been an unrelated trend, by the 1850s or so another slang meaning for nut was “a person’s head” (no real stretch there), and “off one’s nut” meant “crazy.” With these locutions kicking around the zeitgeist, then, it’s entirely unsurprising that the OED shows its first citation for nuts meaning “out of one’s mind” in 1846, from a volume titled The Swell’s Night Guide Through the Metropolis, a kind of risqué handbook to seamy urban life. One can’t know exactly how such shifts went down, but in the case of nuts a relevant stop on the road may have been a bit of late-1700s British slang wherein a person who was enthusiastically fond of something (or someone) was said to be “nuts upon” it, just like we’d say “crazy about.” And in fact at the time Britons were using “crazy for” and (still earlier) “mad for” in roughly this same way, the evident notion being that the subject was so fascinated, infatuated, distracted, etc., that they were effectively insane. And it’s been acquiring meanings other than “shell-encased fruit” all along: the thing a bolt screws into (first spotted in 1611), a question that’s difficult to answer (1545), the part of a musical instrument’s neck that the strings rest on (1698). The word nut has been in circulation since the very dawn of the English language-the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest sighting of it dates back to around the year 875. 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. 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. No, someone tried using an existing word in some novel way, and it stuck. How did any word ever come by a new meaning? It’s not like Noah Webster just announced it in the newsletter one week.
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