In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’.
In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’. I rather think Winston Churchill used it in this sense in his book The Malakand Field Force, but then practically everything the old boy said or wrote in moments of excitement or exaltation would now be banned. To be fair, mad has long been suspect. The OED states, a little pompously one might think: ‘The word has always had some tinge of contempt or disgust, and would now [1989] be quite inappropriate in medical use, or in referring sympathetically to an insane person as the subject of an infliction.’
In any case it has quite a different, albeit related, meaning in the United States, where it signifies anger — as in Robert Kennedy’s maxim, designed to be delivered with eyes narrowed and jaw jutted: ‘Don’t get mad — get even.’ ‘Always in the mads’ was a Southern expression in the 18th century. In the North it took various forms: a pioneer found his way ‘blocked by a grizzly getting his mad up’. You could use it in the reverse too. H.L. Wilson, in Somewhere in Red Gap (1916), writes of a woman: ‘She kept her mad down better. She set there as nice and sweet as a pet scorpion.’ ‘Keeping your mad down’ was holding your temper. I recall L.B.J.
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