Chrysti The Wordsmith: Bats - 1

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. Western folklore has made something of a villain of the bat bats make nests in your hair. Bats are vampires they suck your blood and give you rabies. That's not only inhabit our folklore but they show up in our well-established idioms as well. Consider the expression bats in the belfry a quaint somewhat antiquated lexical formula to describe someone considered peculiar crazy or goofy. In this expression the belfry or a church's bell tower is a metaphor for the human head while the bats that Corrina around in it represent the erratic fluttering thoughts of an unstable mind. The notion of the bell phrase ringing bells helps this expression along as well suggesting perhaps that one with bats in his belfry is also a bit dinghy according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The phrase first appeared in print in an American document in one thousand one but had probably been in verbal circulation for some time prior to that. Journalist Ambrose Bierce used it in a

1997 Cosmopolitan magazine article said watching it between quotation marks a sign of an expression in its infancy. Or one considered almost to slang and to print the phrase bats in the belfry probably spawn the adjective batty meaning zany or nutty. Next time on this series Blind as a bat I'm Christie the wordsmith. Good day verb of course Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.