On the Meaning of Crackpot

Posted on August 22, 2007 in Crosstalk Words

This article is meant to remove discussion about the meaning of the word “crackpot” from Bad Astronomy Blog.

I got into a discussion over on another blog recently about the nature of the word “crackpot”. Does it refer to a person who is mentally ill or not? I thought it did, but then I had a dictionary shoved into my face, to wit: a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical..

I did a little more research on the components of the word. The American Heritage Dictionary (online) says that the word is a formation of crack(ed) and pot (meaning “skull”). I did a little more research and found that the term cracked — aside from its violent, breaking connotation and a few others — meant Informal. eccentric; mad; daffy. (Dictionary.com) Cracked also means to become mentally unstable as in “to crack up”. But dictionary after dictionary insisted that crackpot was not a term used to suggest mental illness.

In a departure from the mainline dictionaries, NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions gives us “A fake; a person with strange or crazy ideas.”

But I have a lot of dictionaries and one of them is a massive copy of the 1971 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary. Here I found this definition:

one given to erratic, irrational, or lunatic ideas (p. 528)

The only place that I had to search deeper than that was my Oxford English Dictionary and, alas, since my edition its historical investigation in the 1920s, it did not contain the word “crackpot”. However it did have a few interesting definitions of “crack” including:

10. A flaw of the brain, a craze, an unsoundness of mind.
15. A crack-brain*, a crazy fellow.

To add a final note, my edition of Roget’s Thesaurus includes the word “crackpot” as a synonym for “lunatic”.

So what happened between 1971 and the present day? A social revolution that didn’t manage to excise the word completely, but attempted, instead, to alter its meaning. Let’s go back to crack + pot. A crack(ed) pot (skull) signifying someone who has been injured in the head. Brain-damaged or a person who wasn’t all there. The usage panel behind the 1971 dictionary had no problem with this slang usage. Then came a revolution which mandated that either the official definition be changed or those using it give it up.

Like the n-word, crackpot was one of those which possessed a certain perjorative snap to it. Evidence was mounting that the mentally ill did not lose all faculties nor were their ideas worthless. The rise of a new chemistry meant that many conditions were controllable. And with the settling down of many patients, we got a better look into how the unsound mind worked. Bipolar disorder, for example, turned out to be a matter of acceleration or deceleration of thought and impulse control. Intelligence tests showed that bipolar sufferers matched well against those who were not afflicted and in one type of intelligence — associational intelligence — smarter. You could make a case that the term crackpot as a synonym for mentally ill person was nothing but a crude pejorative and, as such, should be eliminated from the civil, thinking person’s language.

What’s more there was a constituency with supporters willing to speak out when it was being maligned by this [[slanguage]].

But the sharpness of those cees and those kays was just too much to let go. So a mean kind of political correctness sneaked in. Crackpot had long enjoyed use in political and scientific circles. Its users just couldn’t give it up. So somewhere between 1971 and the present, a revision took place in which all references to lunacy were excised. A whole history of usage was denied just to keep this bit of meanness in the English language.

A certain kind of disingenuousness is required, I think, to believe that this word has lost all its lunatic connotations. “Oh, we just mean eccentric” we’re told as if the term is completely void of antagonism. History has known many eccentrics, men and women with odd little hobbies that sometimes proved to be scientifically valid and sometimes were unrealistic: I would not call all of them crackpots. Nor would I call all eccentrics unrealistic. Occasionally, they caught on to reality better than the rest of us.

Crackpot is just a mean word used by mean people to put down others. And while some dictionaries have deleted references to insanity from their definitions, I believe that those who use it know damn well that the meaning is still there and understood. We don’t accept the argument that someone can use nigger because it is dialect and I don’t think we should accept that crackpot doesn’t mean insane person or nutcase because of the user’s alleged ignorance of its etymological history or the whitewash given it by contemporary lexicographers.

*Pinch me, but doesn’t this sound like a progenitor of “crackpot”?