Lunatic

Word of the Day: Lunatic

The world is full of lunatics, and most of them drive cars.

If you are a driver yourself, you know what I mean.

When on the road, it’s not yourself you have to watch; it’s everybody else.

When we describe someone as a lunatic, we mean they are acting silly or dangerously.

The word is quite interesting. Luna is the Latin word for moon.

Lunatic derives from the Latin word lunaticus.

You can easily see that ‘lunatic‘ is a part of the word.

Hundreds of years ago, people who were suffering from epilepsy or madness were referred to as lunaticus.

You see, the people of the day thought that the moon affected the way some people behaved.

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You may think it is foolishness, but ask any police officer if things become crazier on the streets at night during a full moon.

I’m confident they will have some theories about how a full moon affects some people and causes them to do weird things.

These days, the word lunatic is often associated with more serious negative behaviours.

We have another word, loony, that we use when we mean that someone is crazy and harmless.

I remember my mother used to threaten my father when he was drunk and acting silly by threatening to call the ambulance and have them throw him in the loony bin or mental hospital.

That was very common.

The hospital that primarily dealt with helping people with mental illness was named The Waterford Hospital in my hometown.

However, many people referred to it as the loony bin.

Naturally, that is not very nice, and I’m talking about what people said 37 years ago.

However, I still believe that most drivers on the roads today, naturally myself excluded, are lunatics.

Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 68.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.