October 23, 1996

basket case

Some friends and I are sitting around right now discussing where the phrase "basket case" comes from. One person thinks it comes from an old practice of carrying around crippled people in baskets, but I don't buy it. Where does the phrase really come from?

It really does come from an old practice of carrying crippled people around in baskets.

Basket case first appeared as a slang term in World War I meaning 'a quadruple amputee'. Soldiers who had lost all their limbs actually were carried in baskets, because if they were carried on stretchers, they'd be too likely to fall out. This sense, first attested in 1919, was never extremely common, but it still has a small degree of currency.

The usual senses are all figurative developments meaning, broadly, 'anything whose function is impaired'. The most common specific sense is 'a person who is unable to function normally, due to anxiety, stress, or mental illness'; other subsenses are 'a country unable to pay its debts'; 'an abandoned vehicle that has been stripped of its parts'; and 'an eccentric person'.