wall [OE] Wall comes from Latin vallum ‘rampart’, from vallus ‘stake’ (the ‘v’ was at certain times pronounced as a ‘w’), which implies that the earliest walls were defensive ones around a town or camp. To go to the wall [L16th] is now to fail commercially but originally meant ‘give way’ or ‘be beaten in a battle or fight’. There may be a link to the proverb the weakest go to the wall, which is usually said to derive from the installation of seating round the walls in churches of the late Middle Ages, but the earliest example (from 1549) is ‘When brethren agree not in a house, goeth not the weakest to the walles’. Someone who is off the wall is unconventional or crazy. This is a quite recent phrase, first recorded in the mid 1960s, in the USA. One suggestion is that it refers to the way that a ball sometimes bounces off a wall at an unexpected angle, or it could be a play on up the wall [M20th] ‘crazy’. The proverb walls have ears dates back to the late 16th century. A more rural version is fields have eyes, and woods have ears, which is first recorded in the 13th century. Saying that the writing is on the wall [E18th] is a biblical allusion to the description of Belshazzar’s feast in the Book of Daniel. In this account Belshazzar was the king of Babylon whose death was foretold by a mysterious hand which wrote on the palace wall at a banquet.