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>I haven't checked this, but how is "mental" (Glasgow) documented? > 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. My Supplement to the OED lists as early as 1927 and has only one specifically Glasgow reference, in 1973's _Glasgow Gang Observed_: "They must be mental...Shit-bags the lot of them." Some of the kids I worked with were gang members, but they had no oversas affiliates, as far as I know. I'll check with my Glasgow correspondent Carlos, who's also a good informant on NY kid culture of the '70s and '80s.