| 词汇 | mad as a hatter |
| 词源 | mad as a hatter. Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter in Alice in Won- derland (1865) isn’t responsible for this phrase. Mad as a hatter, “crazy, completely demented,” was used by Thackeray in Pen- dennis (1849) and by that prolific American phrasemaker Thomas Haliburton in The Clockmaker (1837), almost 30 years before Carroll. Several explanations for the expression have been advanced. One holds that the term was originally mad as an adder (an adder being a venomous viper whose bite was once thought to cause insanity) and that British mispronuncia- tion corrupted adder to atter and then hatter. The curious meta- phor is best explained by hatmaking itself, though. The mercu- ric nitrate long used in making felt hats often poisoned hatters, the effects of this mercurial compound causing men who worked with it for years to be afflicted with uncontrollably twitching muscles, a lurching gait, incoherent speech, and con- fused minds. |
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