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barmy (BAHR-mee) - adj., containing or covered with barm, the foam that forms on malt liquors while fermenting; bubbling with activity or excitement; (chiefly UK) crazy, odd, strange, foolish.
The first senses are easy to deal with: it goes back to Old English beorma, both the head/forth on a beer and the yeast that ferments it, from a Germanic root, exact PIE source unclear. That last, though, is much debated -- most authorities hold that it's either a non-rhotic-speaker's respelling of balmy in its sense of crazy/odd/foolish or a respelling influenced by barmy in the frothy sense, but some that it's an alteration of St. Bartholomew, one ward of the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, which last word also gave us bedlam (and Green's Dictionary of Slang notes that there was an asylum in Barming, Kent). So, like, 🤷🏼
---L.
The first senses are easy to deal with: it goes back to Old English beorma, both the head/forth on a beer and the yeast that ferments it, from a Germanic root, exact PIE source unclear. That last, though, is much debated -- most authorities hold that it's either a non-rhotic-speaker's respelling of balmy in its sense of crazy/odd/foolish or a respelling influenced by barmy in the frothy sense, but some that it's an alteration of St. Bartholomew, one ward of the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, which last word also gave us bedlam (and Green's Dictionary of Slang notes that there was an asylum in Barming, Kent). So, like, 🤷🏼
---L.
