Wild Hair

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lindsay from New York, and I had a question for you guys.

Hi, Lindsay. Welcome. What is it?

Last week, I was hanging out with some friends, and I said that I had gotten a wild hair and decided to do something.

And everyone I was with kind of looked at me like I had three heads all of a sudden.

And, you know, it came out that they actually had no idea what I was talking about.

Now, I’m from the South, and I was hanging out with people that are, one was Southern and one was from New York originally.

So it’s a wide group of people, but nobody had heard of this before, and I thought that it was a well-known phrase.

Those provincial New Yorkers.

Where in the South?

Well, I’m from Tennessee.

Okay, okay, very good. Not that it matters much, I’m just curious.

Yeah.

But New Yorkers can’t be provincial.

Well, it just made me wonder if it was an older phrase or where it had come from and why not everyone knows it.

This is good. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t know it.

It’s got a good long history.

It kind of pops up during World War II and is spread by soldiers to the regular populace after the war.

It starts showing up in literature in the 1950s and 60s.

And actually, what I’m talking about is actually the longer form.

You’re using the short form.

The longer form is a wild hair up one’s derriere or rear or behind.

Well, now, wait a minute.

How are we spelling this?

H-A-I-R or H-A-R-E?

Either one would be disturbing.

H-A-I-R.

It’s not H-A-R-E.

So you have a wild H-A-R.

So just imagine that you’ve gotten a haircut and there’s a little extra hair under your collar.

And you’re kind of itched and you’re bothered and you’re irritated.

That’s what we’re talking about here.

But there’s a kind of side meaning.

So the shorter form has become a little more specific.

So if you have a wild hair up your derriere, you might mean you’re angry or maybe you’re irritated.

But if you just have a wild hair, it usually means these days that you had a sudden notion to do something.

And it sounds like the way you used it.

Yeah, that’s how I was using it.

That’s really interesting.

And so it’s W-I-L-D-H-A-I-R, wild hair.

And so it just pops up in literature in the 50s and 60s and 70s.

You’ll hear it in movie scripts and in fiction and books and newspaper articles.

There it is.

It’s just part of English.

It’s one of those idioms we use.

I don’t know that it’s hugely common, but it’s common enough that I’m kind of surprised that everyone else was stumped and mystified.

That’s what I thought.

My mom thought that maybe it was an older phrase, and that’s why maybe it’s being phased out.

I don’t think of the 1940s or 50s as being that old for the creation of a new phrase like this.

That’s actually kind of young, really.

And it’s so wonderfully evocative, too.

I mean, that’s the kind of thing that makes you do things, right?

Yeah, I’ve got a wild hair.

Get up and do what needs to be done.

Like this thing that’s tickling you in a sensitive place that makes you go get busy.

Well, I’ll spread the word about it.

Yeah, sure.

And they need to read more trashy fiction or something.

I don’t know what the remedy is for their predicament.

I’ll just hang out with you, Lindsay.

Yeah, there we go.

A little more Tennessee and New York, right?

Right.

All right, thanks for calling, Lindsay.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

You know, we’re joking about this.

There’s no reason that everyone should know everything in English.

No.

It’s impossible.

Well, that’s what makes this beautiful, wonderful, mosaic, crazy, corrective language.

And we all have these things.

They’re mystifying to us, right?

Some of the best lexicographers I know, people who work with words and build dictionaries all day long,

Love to tell each other about, here’s this great new word I didn’t know existed and everyone else was aware of.

It’d be boring otherwise.

Yeah.

It’d be boring.

Boring.

You know what’s not boring?

On the phone calling us 877-929-9673.