Meshuge

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Describing someone who is foolish, eccentric or mentally unbalanced in a way that seems irrational to others
2. Used of a person or idea that strikes others as wildly unreasonable, odd or out of their mind
3. Crazy, deranged or absurd, a Yiddish-derived term for behaviour or thinking that makes no sense

Etymology: "Meshuge" comes from Yiddish "meshugener," meaning a crazy person, which is itself borrowed from Hebrew "meshuga" (or "meshugga"), "insane," from the verb "shagah," to go astray, err, or be mad. The Hebrew verb is the root of the older sense "to wander off course," the same idea that gives English its sense of a mind that has strayed from reason. The Yiddish forms built on this with the agentive suffix "-ener," so "meshugener" names a person, while "meshuge" is the adjective-like form used for "crazy" in speech. Yiddish speakers in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe carried the word into the immigrant speech of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where it became common in American English as a casual term for someone eccentric or out of their mind.

Synonyms: crazy, insane, mad, nuts

Antonyms: sane, rational, sensible