Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Bee in your bonnet

Can I have someone from the 19th century say You've got a bee in your bonnet! (meaning "preoccupied or obsessed with an idea")? Or would that be anachronistic?

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It looks like I'm safe in doing so! According to this post in Mental Floss, which offers up these tidbits on the earliest use (and possible origins):

...One of the earliest examples of a similar bee-based phrase can be found in Scottish poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s epic Aeneid into Scottish verse, in which he writes, “Quhat bern be thou in bed, with hed full of beys.” The sentence roughly translates to “What, man, rot thou in bed with thy head full of bees,” and alludes to a Scottish idiom about having a “head full of bees,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “having a fantasy, an eccentric whim, a craze on some point, [or] a ‘screw loose.’”...

It’s likely that bee in your bonnet evolved from that Scottish idiom to its more modern interpretation: That of having such a singular focus on a particular idea, seemingly to the point of obsession. The Reverend John Barker certainly gave the Scots credit when he offered one of the earliest recorded examples of the more familiar phrase in a 1738 letter to the Reverend Philip Doddridge: “He has, as the Scotch call it, a Bee in his Bonnet."

The post goes on and is quite fun to read (check it out!)... The Phrase Finder also has a similar entry here, which also references Doddridge's letter.

This being spring, with bees emerging and buzzing about, be careful not to get any bees in your bonnet. Better that there be bees in your garden!

Now here's someone who clearly *wants* to have a bee in her bonnet.
Image by Davinia from Pixabay