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.
I too have a cant verse, at:
http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/midwin/country.htm
...based largely on Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1811, but selectively reprinted 1981 by Macmillan). It's very lewd.
Best,
--
Peter
http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
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