Deranged Words

If I told you someone was deranged, you’d probably come up with a fairly specific mental image. The look probably involves eyes staring off into the distance, limbs akimbo, and no real awareness of how you look to others.

Ren from the classic Nickelodeon show Ren and Stimpy comes to mind first for me:

Of course, word meanings drift over time, and the word deranged provides us with another great example of linguistic drift. This occurs for a variety of reasons, but it happens even more regularly whenever a word from another language is imported into the language.

English has imported more French than all other languages put together, so there are an awful lot of formerly French words in English that mean something totally different now.

Deranged comes directly from the French word déranger, which meant literally to disturb the order of things. I don’t mean merely the order of the universe or the order of the world, but instead the order of pieces on a chess board, or figures in a ledger.

That’s because those things are in neat rows, and row is one meaning of range. If you put things out of their range, they would then be described as dérangé. English always wants adjectives made from nouns to end in -ed, so that’s what happened.

Range made its way over to England by the 1300s, where it was used to mean a literal row, like a mountain range or a range of soldiers in a line. When dérangér arrived in the 1600s, it was all about this literal meaning. Deranged soldiers weren’t crazy—they just weren’t lined up neatly.

Metaphors are gonna metaphor.

Deranged had always meant disordered, but during the 1700s, people started using the word to refer to plans that had been disorganized. It was a very short step to analogize this with the human mind, which can seem to be in a state of disarray whenever you’re flustered or under the weather.

The linguistic journey wasn’t quite done, though. Today, we don’t use deranged to refer to a wide range of mental states. Instead, we mean something very specific, like that image of Ren I shared.

These days, if we say that someone is deranged, we mean they’re mentally unhinged in a dangerous or dark sort of way.