I rather like the term “batshit crazy.”
It has a fantastic ring to it and telegraphs very well the notion that the individual,
group or entity being described is indeed not your common or garden crazy, but
rather a level beyond madness’ ordinary limits.
Alas, its etymology does not point where
I had hoped it would point. I was praying that a particular form of insanity
descended upon spelunkers due to repeated inhalation of bat guano, but there
appear only to be anecdotal citations in that direction, perhaps others who likewise wished it were so. It seemed the Occum’s razor for me, as in my
native New England, the phrase, “crazier than a shit house rat” enjoys some
popularity and indeed owes its etymology to the syndrome of rats who haunt
poorly maintained outhouses being afflicted with violent and unpredictable
personalities.
The term “batshit” began to appear as
an equivalent to “bullshit” in military jargon of the 1950s, even showing up in
that context in some printed material. Its attachment to “crazy” was not seen
at that time, but it bears mentioning, as that coining of "batshit" as a single word appears to be its first,
and documentation on it is solid.
An old expression for madness was “bats
in the belfry,” the belfry of a church representing the head of a person, with
the idea being that one’s mind was full of blind, winged night rodents, a
metaphor of madness that carries with it the charm of grotesquerie, like a story by
Poe or a drawing by Edward Gorey. The best guess then at the evolution of “batshit
crazy” seems to be a gradual profaning of "bats in the belfry" via the incorporation of the previously familiar term “batshit” from its
1950s military usage. And in this way, the
expression as we know it stumbled to its feet.
There is a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove named Colonel “Bat” Guano (1964), an
obvious reference to “batshit,” and Hunter S. Thompson used the phrase “batshit
insane” in the Fear and Loathing books in the early 1970s. Between those two
high-profile cultural usages, “batshit,” “batshit crazy,” and “batshit insane” came
into common parlance, and have had waxing and waning popularity since, but
thanks in no small part to the 2016 presidential race, all three are back
and ready for action.
