Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy for Free Online Page A

the next of kin retained some legal claim to life insurance policies where the purchaser of the policy had no insurable interest in the deceased. That wasn’t much of a problem when the policies were a well-kept secret, but as the publicity generated by one horror story after another brought the policies out into the open, more families of the deceased began to sue. So did many “peasants” who weren’t dead yet: Because life insurance policies have a cash value even while the insured is alive, many employees who’d had policies taken out against them without their consent filed suit to claim some of the cash for themselves.

FREEING THE SERFS
    For many companies who held them, dead peasant policies became a nightmare. The publicity was devastating, and when all the closed loopholes and lawsuits were tallied up, many policies were now money losers. Wal-Mart alone lost $150 million on the 350,000 dead peasant policies it purchased between 1993 and 1995.
    Dead peasant policies are still alive and well in the states that allow them. But federal law now requires companies to obtain the written consent of the insured; in all, it’s estimated that today companies hold policies on as many as five million workers. At least these dead peasants have been informed that they’re dead peasants, and have given their consent.
    But does it really make them feel any better?

CRAZY WORD ORIGINS

    You’d be insane not to want to know where all these nutty words for “crazy” came from—and how to properly use them, so people don’t think you’re batty .
    C RAZY / CRACKED / CRACKPOT
The verb “to craze” originally meant “to violently shatter,” and most likely came from an Old Norse word. It was first applied to people in 1555 to describe one who was “in ill health.” The use of “crazed” and “crazy” to describe the mentally impaired came about 40 years later. The term “cracked,” from the same root, was first applied to mental derangement around 1611. “Crackpot” is more recent, first appearing in the late 1800s. Often used to describe people with unusual ideas, it was short for “cracked pot”—“pot” having been a common slang term for “head” since the 16th century.

INSANE
    The Latin word sanus means “healthy,” but in English, the term “sane” wasn’t attributed to a “healthy mind” until about 1600. About the same time, its opposite, “insane,” also came into use. The term is no longer used by the medical establishment, who instead refer to a patient’s specific mental illness (such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or schizophrenia). So, technically, no one can be clinically diagnosed as “insane.”

BATTY
    There are a few theories as to where this term came from. A popular one says that it was named for Fitzherbert Batty, a prominent English barrister known for being eccentric, who was certified insane in 1839. London’s newspapers widely publicized the diagnosis, and ever since, “batty” has been used to describe anyone who is harmlessly crazy. Another possible origin is that “batty” is short for “bats in the belfry” (or bell tower), an Americanism dating to at least 1899, when it appeared in William J. Kountz’s Billy Baxter’s Letters : “The leader tore out about $9.00 worth of hair, and acted generally as though he had bats in his belfry.”
----
Sticky fingers? Ben & Jerry’s sells a combination lock for its ice cream containers .
----

NUTS
    “Nut” in its original sense—peanuts and cashews, for instance—is a very old word, most likely coming from the Indo-European root knu, which meant “lump.” The English word “nut” first appeared around A.D. 875, but wasn’t used to refer to a person’s head until the mid-1800s. Around the same time, anyone who acted a little off kilter was said to be “off his nut” or just “nuts.” However, referring to a crazy person as a “nut” wasn’t common until around 1903. (The British form,