A woman in Hemet, California, wonders about plumb crazy, as in totally, completely crazy. The plumb in this case has to do with a plumb line, a line often weighted with lead to determine verticality. This plumb derives from Latin word for the element lead, plumbum, which is abbreviated on the periodic table as Pb. It has no etymological connect to the fruit plum. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Where Does the “Plumb” in “Plumb Crazy” Come From?”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hello, my name is Sharon and I’m from Hemet, California.
Well, welcome to the show, Sharon. How can we help you?
I grew up in a southern family. I’m an immigrant from Oklahoma to California.
And my mother used to use the phrase, and my father too, of plum crazy.
As a kid, I just didn’t understand it.
What does plum, like the fruit, of course, have to do with being crazy or, you know, that’s just plum stupid.
It usually had a derogatory, you know, ending towards it.
As I grew up, I was in like the construction business.
And the plumb line on a, like a chalk plumb line, where you flick it and you get a straight line on a wall in order to, you know, set up walls or whatever.
That’s called a plumb line.
And I just thought, well, maybe that’s what it meant.
Guess what?
It is.
A plumb line is a line that has a lead weight at the bottom of it.
And the plum in this case comes from the Latin plumbum, which means lead.
And it makes that line completely, perfectly straight.
And when you’re talking about somebody who’s plum crazy or plum tuckered out,
They are completely, absolutely no margin for error, whatever the adjective is.
As a kid growing up, I would ask my parents, what do you mean?
What does that mean?
And they could never, you know, come up with it.
As I grew older, I put it together with architectural kind of situations.
I go, I wonder if it just means straight on plum crazy, straight on plum stupid, just straight on.
Sharon, you’re exactly right.
It has nothing to do with the fruit.
It has to do with that heavy weight at the end of the line that makes it completely straight.
Well, maybe it was in the shape of a plum then.
I don’t think so.
No, it has nothing to do with the fruit at all.
It’s just about the lead in it.
The lead weight on the end of the string that makes the string straight.
So, Sharon, thank you so much for calling.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Sharon. Bye-bye.
Okay. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
But the crazy is interesting, too.
That was her first question was the word crazy, plum crazy.
I was talking to a dentist recently who was telling me that a crazed tooth is a cracked tooth.
Oh, like a crazed window or a crazed enamel on a pot or something.
Exactly. And that was the original sense of crazy was shattered, cracked.
And we do use cracked as a synonym for insane or having mental health issues.
Same idea with a crazy quilt.
It looks like it’s cracked.
Interesting.
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