A kangaroo loose in the top paddock

Image by Lynda Hinton, courtesy of Unsplash.

There’s a colourful Australian idiom to have (a few/a couple of) kangaroos/a kangaroo (loose) in the top paddock, meaning, to use another idiom, ‘to have a screw loose’, or ‘to be eccentric or unhinged’. I don’t know how long it’s been around and there’s no Oxford English Dictionary citation for it, but Jonathon Green’s earliest citation in his magisterial online Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from 1945: ‘to have kangaroos in one’s top paddock and to have the white ants, to be silly or mad’.

This is from a book of that year called The Australian Language, which suggests that the phrase itself must predate such a collection of Strineisms. There are several examples in the NOW (News on the Web) corpus of 14.6 billion words:

though he’d had to renounce his Australian citizenship to nominate, the opposition continued to make jibes about his provenance — even distributing a flyer with a picture of Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee saying the candidate had “kangaroos loose in the top paddock”.

How do we work out what it means so easily?

It only takes an instant’s reflection to twig what it means, but how exactly can we do that so quickly? I suggest it’s because it’s a variation or an outlier of an underlying idea, of an underlying conceptual metaphor, if you will. That underlying conceptual metaphor is THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING, which relies in turn on the conceptual metaphor THE BODY IS A BUILDING.  

Far-fetched, I hear you mutter? Let me persuade you otherwise. First of all, the idea of the body as a building goes back in English at least as far as Old English, when the body might be referred to poetically by the kenning ‘a bone-house’ (banhus).

The body can be conceptualised in different ways. One standard one that we have no problem in using again and again is THE BODY IS A CONTAINER (and ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER) as expressed in dozens of idioms such as ‘he blew a fuse’, ‘steam was coming out of his ears’, ‘he bottled up his anger’, ‘she flipped her lid’, and so forth. That conceptual metaphor is well attested in the academic literature. Similarly, we regularly draw on the metaphor RELATIONSHIPS ARE BUILDINGS through such metaphors as ‘our friendship has a firm foundation’, ‘we have a solid relationship’, ‘their friendship began to crumble’, etc.

THE BODY IS A BUILDING conceptual metaphor

Less attested, or possibly not attested at all for all I know, is THE BODY IS A BUILDING.

Let’s look first at a couple of ‘creative’, that is, original metaphors harnessing this. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle drew on this mind metaphor when he wrote:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

George Bernard Shaw drew on the same conceptual metaphor:

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

Those two are a creative simile and a metaphor, respectively, that instantiate the conceptual metaphor THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING. That metaphor is also lexicalised in everyday language in to have bats in the belfry (OED, c.1901) meaning ‘to be mad or eccentric’ and to have a bee in one’s bonnet about something. Actually, that started out as to have bees in one’s head (OED, 1553) and it was not until 1845 that De Quincey is cited as writing the bonnet version.

What’s more, while those are the two idioms that standard dictionaries give, there are other slangier versions of the same idea (courtesy of Jonathon Green):

to have rats in the garret/attic (1842 [OED]/1899)
to have beetles in one’s attic/arcade (1902/1910)
to have bugs in the head (1897)

The BODY IS A BUILDING in other languages

Fine, I hear you mumble. These are just English idiomatic phrases that riff off or clone each other.

In reply, I say that if it were purely a linguistic phenomenon within English, we mightn’t expect to find parallels in other languages. But we do find them:

French: avoir une arraignée au plafond (literally, to have a spider on the ceiling’, which Oxford translates aptly as ‘to have bats in the belfry’).

Danish: at have rotter på loftet ‘to have rats in the attic’ (now, where have I heard that before?)

German: a) schwach/nicht ganz richtig im Oberstübchen sein,‘to be weak/not all right in the little upper room’, in which the noun Oberstübchen seems to exist only in the idiom; and

b) einen Dachschaden haben, literally ‘to have roof damage’– and it is also used literally! Collins translates it as ‘to have a slate loose’ which fortuitously brings in another example of THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING that I hadn’t thought about.

There might be others in other languages, and I’d love to hear them from you if you happen to know of any.

Meanwhile, back at to have a kangaroo loose in the top paddock and variants, rather than conceptualising the mind as the top storey of a building, it views it as the upper part of a physical space, a farm or similar. Why should it be the ‘top’ paddock unless it is calling on that top storey metaphor? At the same time, it seems to play to another metaphor, namely, MADNESS IS ANIMALS IN A BOUNDED SPACE. This provides another rationale for to have bats in the belfry, but also links to as mad as a box of frogs, not to mention to have kangaroos loose in the top paddock.