Our Living Language

 You may have heard the expression “get a wild hair up your butt.” In current usage, it usually refers to a person who is particularly exercised over some problem. Why on earth, you probably thought to yourself, would a hair up one’s rectum cause maniacal behavior? After all, how aggravating can one little hair be? And while we’re about it, how did it get there?

The illogic of this has caused some modern writers to write “get a wild hare up one’s butt”—presumably because having a wild rodent lodged in one’s anus would indeed cause rather animated behavior. But this, of course, is ridiculous. The largest rodent ever lodged in a human rectum is a small hamster, as reported in the August, 1997, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by a physician at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

The reality is quite an interesting story, and illustrates how our language develops over time. The first thing that needs to be said is that “up your butt” is a typical crude accretion added for emphasis in recent times and has nothing to do with the origin of the phrase, which in no way involves a medical condition such as might be presented to a proctologist. Continue reading →