Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Haywire

 Ever had those times when you've had life go haywire, as in "become wildly confused, out of control, or crazy" (definition courtesy of The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer)?

Well, I'm here to tell you all about it....

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... or at least, about the etymology of this bit o' slang!

Ammer offers that go haywire "alludes to the wire used for bundling hay, which is hard to handle and readily tangled." She also places its first appearance in the first half of the 1900s, which is a pretty wide swath of time. For historical fiction writers, there is a big difference as to whether this phrase entered common use in 1901 vs 1950.

Let's see what other references have to say about going haywire...

The Online Etymology Dictionary has this nice entry, starting with its more prosaic definition:

haywire (n) "soft wire for binding bales of hay," by 1891, from hay + wire (n.). Adjective meaning "poorly equipped, makeshift" is 1905, American English, from the sense of something held together only with haywire, particularly said to be from use of the stuff in New England lumber camps for jury-rigging and makeshift purposes, so that hay wire outfit became the "contemptuous term for loggers with poor logging equipment" [Bryant, "Logging," 1913]. Its springy, uncontrollable quality led to the sense in go haywire (by 1915).

So, 1915, eh? Could I then have a character go haywire in a story set during in the early days of Prohibition, for instance?

Not so fast, says The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology by Robert K. Barnhart, which places the first recording of go haywire in 1929. The Guardian has folks chiming in, offering various dates from "early 1900" to a more recent use in 1940s. 

Enough of this wishy-washy waving of hands. Time to bring out the big guns: Google Ngram. Running down the list of  references, I found a 1916 utterance of this problematic phrase in Nick of the Woods by "Alaska Blacklock" (a pseudonym of George Edward Lewis). In his tale of the still-wild Northwest frontier, the idiomatic term gone haywire is used in dialogue as a bit of wordplay-with-a-wink with the noun haywire:

Hey! (or should I make that "Hay!" 🤣 )... 1916 (or so) works for me! 

Hay wire in a lovely green field or haywire in a crazy day? Depends on how you're feeling!
Left image by Mikhail Timofeev from Pixabay; Right image by David Bruyland from Pixabay