Talking Southern No. 90 : Hens, Hatters, and Cut Snakes

      Let’s talk about three kinds of mad for a minute.  If you’re enumerating the types, you have on one finger the kind of mad that means angry or enraged, and you have on the next finger the condition that perhaps can best be described as being “odd” – not really clinically insane or affected, but someone who marches to such a different drumbeat than everyone else that he or she sometimes comes across as being two or three bricks shy of a full load. Finally, there’s the kind of mad that means mentally ill or disease-ravaged, as understood in far less pedestrian terms on a clinical basis

     We have some phrases for all three conditions in the South (and perhaps elsewhere).  For the kind of mad that means angry or enraged, we might say, “Mad as a wet hen.”   Your compiler actually asked his grandmother about this one time, for in addition to being the long-time school principal in Brooks (from 1942 until 1970), she also had four good-sized chicken houses in the 1940s and 1950s, which produced eggs to supplement the family income and provided a pullet for Sunday dinner most weeks.

     What she told him was intriguing:  “Sometimes a laying hen would get so feisty and moody and protective of her eggs that we couldn’t get to them in time to ensure freshness, and what we’d sometimes do was to pour about half a bucket of cold water on her to re-calibrate her attitude.  She’d react by sputtering and fussing to beat the band, but then calm down pretty quickly.   I guess the old saying comes from those first few moments after you soak the hen.”  So there we have it, straight from a chicken expert, herself.

   If a person is so angry that he’s irate and out of control, “mad as a wet hen” is too tame a phrase for that. Instead, once might say, “He’s mad as a cut snake.”  This would seem to come from the violent, erratic, and reflexive movement of a snake whose head has been severed – somebody so angry and unpredictable he or she might strike out at anybody.

     For the different drumbeat kind of mad, one often used to hear, “Mad as a hatter.”  Your compiler always thought this had to be a reference to the Mad Hatter character in the Alice in Wonderland stories of Lewis Carroll.   Imagine his surprise when researching the term for this column to discover the phrase predates the Carroll stories by quite some time.   It apparently arose during the day when men wore stovepipe–style top hats.   Mercury was used in the tanning process for such hats, and it adversely affected the health of many hatters in a way that led to the saying’s coinage in the 1820s, several decades before Carroll developed what appears to have been relatively unhealthily obsession with young Alice Liddell and wrote his classic stories about and for her.

     Finally, there’s the “something’s badly wrong with him”  kind of mad, and for that, we use “Mad as a hatter” yet again.  Actually, we’re liable to skip the “mad” terminology altogether, and instead use a term reminiscent of the substance oft found in the bottom of caves frequented by the only mammals capable of true flight.  The second word of the phrase is “crazy,” but unfortunately, the first word of the term, which is hyphenated, contains, in the poet G. W. Carryl’s words, a “brief, emphatic word unfit for publication,” so on that note, we will leave it to your imagination and offer our farewells for this week.