maggoted

A reader spoke up for maggoted as her all-time favourite for Word of the Year while wondering ‘what wit thought that one up’.

The story starts in Scotland and northern England in the early 1800s where an odd idea that possessed a person, an eccentric notion if not a mania, was described as a maggot in the brain.  A vivid image, you have to admit. Such a person was maggoty, that is, eccentric, full of wild ideas and beyond all reason.

In Australia we associated that out-of-control state of mind with being drunk, and changed the form of the word from maggoty to maggoted. The meaning for us now is ‘intoxicated to the point of being out of your mind’.