So you’ll have to take your pick among anger, despair, and insanity. Lately, the expression has been shortened to simply “losing it.” But, just to confuse things, “losing it” also can mean losing one’s temper. An imaginative theory, but there’s no evidence to support it. The idea was that the expression arose from the loss of the artworks by the Greeks, or their subsequent loss at sea when the ship transporting them sank. These sculptures were taken from Athens by Lord Elgin in 1806.

Experts think the expression started in the. The expression has existed for quite a while, of that we are sure. One theory suggests that “losing one’s mind” derives from the Elgin Marbles. Losing your marbles means, you are going crazy. In the mid-1800s, “marbles” was also used to mean “personal effects,” or “stuff,” which derived from the French word meubles, meaning “furniture.” It’s easy to see how that could be expanded to mean “mind furniture.” Bogart’s performance was so good that many people have assumed the film to be the source of the phrase. The 1954 film, The Caine Mutiny, linked insanity with marbles when Humphrey Bogart showed his character, the demented Lieutenant Commander Queeg, in court and under stress, restlessly jiggling a set of metal balls. Jones as Gallia’s candidate, but got his marbles mixed and did as much for the institution of which he is the noted head as he did for his candidate.”

Davis, of Rio Grande college, was selected to present J. This transition to the “losing one’s mind” meaning is shown in the Ohio newspaper The Portsmouth Times, which reported a story in April 1898 that referred to marbles as a synonym for mental capacity: “Prof. It’s a small step from “anger and despair” to the wider meaning of doing something “stupid or senseless.” All the early citations convey the sense of loss and the consequent reaction to it, but by 1927, the “loss of sanity” meaning had won over “anger and despair.” Louis Globe-Democrat of August 1886: “He has roamed the block all morning like a boy who had lost his marbles.” An early citation of this figurative usage is found in the St. To play was always to run the risk of losing all one’s marbles and the result might easily be anger, frustration, and despair. This American phrase arose in the late 1800s, probably from the game of marbles, which was common at the time. In any case, your mind isn’t functioning as it should. When you lose your marbles, you’ve lost your mind, or gone insane, or part of your brain is missing.

When u lose your marbles