mad [OE] In English mad has always meant ‘insane’, but by Late Middle English it could also mean ‘angry’, a standard meaning still in American English, but which has largely died out in British English. Mad for or about, ‘enthusiastic or passionate’, is Middle English. In extreme cases a person can be as mad as a hatter [E19th] or as mad as a March hare [E16th]. The comparison with hatters has an uncertain origin, although the phrase is widely attributed to poisoning by the mercury used in manufacturing some hats. The phrase was around in the 1820s, but from 1865 it was popularized by the Mad Hatter, one of the characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As mad as a March hare arose from the excitable behaviour of hares at the beginning of the breeding season. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ was how Lady Caroline Lamb described the poet Lord Byron after their first meeting at a ball in 1812. ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen / Go out in the midday sun’ is the beginning of a 1931 song by the English dramatist, actor, and composer Noël Coward. Maddening [E18th] had become ‘irritating’ by the end of the 19th century. The word madding [LME] is a rather poetic way of saying ‘acting madly’. It is most familiar through the phrase far from the madding crowd, ‘private or secluded’. Many will associate it with the title of one of Thomas Hardy’s classic novels, but Hardy took the title from a line in Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’, published in 1751: ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’. Mad scientists have been with us since the 1890s.