From: "Peter Howard" <[log in to unmask]>
> On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Mark Weiss wrote...
>
> >Robin: My own sense of "mental" = deranged is that it I heard it first
in
> >the US when I was working with adolescents from the housing projects in
New
> >York's Lower East Side in the '80s and that it's now pretty wide spread.
>
> The Cassell dates "mental" as a noun from the 1910s and as an adjective
> from the 1920s. I certainly used it/had it used about me when I was a
> kid (60s/70s) growing up nowhere near Glasgow.
Cassell (admitedly better than Oxford/Slang) still locates the term in the
area of mental illness. My sense is that the Glasgow usage was closer to
something like "berserk".
But it does look, from what Mark and Peter say, as if the term was fairly
widespread, and maybe having different meanings in different areas.
Independent coinages? But whatever, not well documented. The School of
Scottish Studies at Edinburgh in (I think) the sixties, attempting to
preserve The Language of the People decided (may they burn in hell for a
good long time for the decision) not to document urban (as opposed to
rural) speech.
But this was before we had "Six Glasgow Poems" and _Lanark_ and _The
Busconductor Hines_ and _Trainspotting_ ...
More fools them.
Robin Hamilton
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