Sorry, I got carried away. My emotions got in the driver’s seat and the feelings-car just took off. I was a mere passenger.
The phrase carried away is very English, but the idea of being driven around by your emotions is ancient. The Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s 2000-year-old sacred texts, talks about a similar maritime situation:
For whichever of the roaming senses the mind follows, that carries away his discernment, as the wind carries a boat upon the water.
Boats can carry you away just as well as a wagon can, although the word carry goes back to the Gaulish word for wagon. Rome digested this word karros and Latinized it into carrus, and Late Latin saw it morph into a verb—to load something onto a wagon. This broadened into a more universal meaning of transporting goods or people.
People could get carried away by intense emotions before the phrase carried away existed, but the English bread crumb trail is worth following.
This trail starts in German. Martin Luther wrote in 1522 that no act of sin occurs unless a person “plunges into it completely with body and soul.”
fahre ganz mit Leib und Seele dahin
That’s not particularly shocking or revelatory, but four years later, a fellow named William Tyndale translated Luther’s text and provided a little commentary. In doing so, he changed the meaning entirely:
A man then sinneth when he is carried away headlong into sin … For there is none outward sin committed except a man be carried away altogether, with life, soul, heart, body, lust and mind thereunto.
Tyndale is saying that you don’t plunge into sin so much as you are carried into it. One is active and one is passive; one shows that you have control over your decisions and the other implies that they have control over you.
By 1621, Robert Burton was writing that “all men are carried away with passion, discontent, lust, pleasures.” The phrase itself got carried away from there.