These sources claim that the crazy banana meaning comes from the phrase “banana oil,” which, in flapper slang, meant “nonsense.” The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English traces the idea of bananas relating to craziness only back to the late 1910s The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English roughly agrees, with its own etymology going back to 1924.
More specifically, though, to go bananas means to lose control it is a temporary insanity, one that usually has a known cause. There are a few ideas about how the word banana, and the phrase “go bananas,” became a way to indicate craziness. The fruit was first brought to the New World in 1516, by Portuguese sailors, where it became widely grown throughout the tropics. Let’s get started with “banana.” The earliest records of the banana plant come from Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea, but the word probably comes from the West African language Wolof bananas have been grown in West Africa for thousands of years. To put it in another, definitely worse way: What if….it’s language itself….that is bananas, crackers, and/or nuts? B-A-N-A-N-A-S. But their etymologies are not related, and show just how weird and broken and non-systematic language can be. There are reasons, or at least guesses, for the winding path these three terms took. What we’re doing is looking at a linguistic blip: How did three, and only three, food-related terms become shorthand for mental illness? We’re also not really examining the history of the way people talk about mental illness. Calling someone “nuts” isn’t exactly a diagnosis. It’s worth noting that in this article-as in the M*A*S*H episode-we will not be very specific in defining the word “crazy,” largely because the terms we’re looking at here are not in themselves specific. (It’s not a good episode in terms of social awareness.) The three foodstuffs in the episode’s title are the only three in American English that can also mean “crazy.” There is an episode from the 1972 first season of the television show M*A*S*H titled “Bananas, Crackers, and Nuts.” In it, Hawkeye decides to secure a rest and recuperation break from the war by faking insanity, which he does by, among other things, pretending to be in love with another man.