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Today's Word "Haywire"

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Published in Vocabulary

haywire \HEY-wIr\ (adjective) - (Colloquial) Crazy, out of control.

"Melissa's cat had a haywire moment this weekend and started chasing dogs."

 

Today's term is colloquial if not slang, which means its usage is restricted to casual conversation and circumscribed from formal writing. Many think today's word is a story of semantics gone haywire. "Haywire" originated as a normal compound of the words "hay" and "wire" denoting the wire used to bale hay. However, in the days before duct tape (no, it wasn't originally used to tape ducks), clueless toolless people made the same repairs with haywire. As early as 1905 the term "haywire outfit" was used to refer to a poorly equipped work crew, taking on the adjectival meaning "makeshift" or "jury-rigged" (the original spelling of "jerry-rigged"). Then, in a totally unrelated development, it acquired the sense of "crazy, unpredictable" because of the unpredictable way it flies apart when, tightly stretched around a bale of hay, it is cut to open the bale.


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