Re: Potty

Posted by ESC on January 20, 2004

In Reply to: Phrases posted by Leaf on January 20, 2004

: Does ayone know the origin of 'It's enough to drive me potty'?

I am not British. But Mr. Thorne says:

POTTY - adj., British. "eccentric, slightly mad, impractical. A (usually) affectionate epithet deriving from crackpot (which itself derives from 'crack-pate'), typically used by middle-class schoolchildren in the 1950s and 1960s and now a rather dated colloquialism." From "The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang" by Tony Thorne (Pantheon Books, New York, 1990).