In Sanity: by Mordechai Schiller

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In Sanity
By Mordechai
Schiller
Tuesday, October 20, 2015 | ' "
I once asked a clinical psychologist Whats the official term for someone whos off his rocker?
I expected a dissertation based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
He said, Crazy.
Psychology is not an exact science. Dr. Charlton Stanley, a founding member of the American Board of Forensic
Psychology, wrote, Insanity is a legal term found nowhere in any psychiatric or psychological diagnostic manual.
Stanley quoted the wild beast standard used in 18th-century England: If a defendant was so bereft of sanity that
he understood the ramifications of his behavior no more than in an infant, a brute, or a wild beast, he would not be
held responsible for his crimes.
Then, in 1843, a Scottish woodcutter named Daniel MNaughten tried to assassinate Prime Minister of England, Sir
Robert Peel. But the prime minister wasnt in his carriage that day; he rode in the carriage of Queen Victoria. And, by
mistake, MNaughten shot the prime ministers secretary, Mr. Edward Drummond.
MNaughtens attorney won an acquittal with an insanity defense.
Queen Victoria wasnt amused. She was quoted as saying, Anyone who tries to kill a government minister cannot
possibly be insane.
She didnt just get mad, though. She got even. At her request, a panel of jurists established the MNaughten Rule:
To establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the
act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the
nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
So how do you know if someone knows what hes doing? I wish I knew.
(Pardon the generic he. It flows from the Victorian-age statement. Besides, I suspect that shes will not be offended
by my presuming the perpetrator is male.)
Sometimes its easy to confuse insanity and inanity. William Safire cited a letter to the editor in the Salt Lake City
Tribune that misquoted breathtaking inanity as breathtaking insanity.
That may have been a typo, Safire wrote, but many others equate inane with insane. Theres a difference. Insane
is rooted in the Latin sanus, sound, healthy, also the basis of sanitation. Insane is applied to the health of the mind,
and means unsound, unhealthy, mentally deranged, mad, though these words carry a stigma and are no longer
used by medical professionals in describing mental states. Inane is Latin for empty and came to mean emptyheaded, silly, vacuous.
A word that could connote either insanity or inanity is mishegas. Safire once corrected a colleague for spelling
mishegas the way I just did. He preferred mishegoss. He said that spelling better reflects the pronunciation of the
Yiddish term (mish-eh-GOSS). He added it is rooted in the Hebrew adjective meshuga, mad, insane. But, citing
Leo Rosten, he said mishegoss is more often used in a light, amused, madcap vein: a wacky, irrational, absurd
belief . . . a piece of tomfoolery or, in another sense, a foolish fixation.
Safire proudly resorted to Yiddishisms (A Yiddish word or idiom, especially one adopted into another language
New Oxford American Dictionary.) He defended the practice, saying, This is an example of a vocabugap (vo-CAByou-gap), a word I was forced to coin today to describe the situations in our lives for which we have no English word
and have to turn to a foreign language for lexical expansion.
I hate to disagree with Safire or his spelling, but, in his words, As they say in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. (Thats how
colonels can disagree with generals without having the eagles stripped off their shoulders.)
Im not the only one who nonconcurs. Sol Steinmetz, whom Safire called the lexical supermaven, also spelled it
meshugas. A book Steinmetz coauthored, Meshuggenary, defined meshugas as slang: Something crazy; madness;
craze. It also gave two alternate spellings: meshugaas and mishegas. But not mishegoss.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) jumped right into the vocabugap. They date meshugas back to Israel Zangwill,
writing in 1898. They define it: Esp. in Jewish usage: madness, craziness; nonsense, foolishness; a foolish idea;
a foible, an idiosyncracy. OED then lists 10 alternate spellings, including mishegoss.
If you think thats meshuga, in 2009, NYC Mayor Bloomberg blasted the state Senate for adjourning for the summer
without first voting to extend his control over the citys school system. He ungrammatically said it was
meshugeneh.
State Senator Hiram Monserrate, who is Hispanic, responded:
We believe it would be meshugeneh not to include parents in the education of our children. As opposed to loosely
using the word meshugeneh, we would also say we dont need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this
debate.
Ol!
Please send smiles, sticks and stones to [email protected].

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hamodia.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015 | ' "

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