I too can etym-historically assert, attest and witness that the said term
'mental' was in common deranged parlance in the Birmingham of my childhood,
that is to say late 50's onwards.
david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Howard <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2000 10:40 AM
Subject: Re: newbie to the list with a cant verse to enjoy
> 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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