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MAD WORDS
As a paranoid schizophrenic myself, I have interesting experience of the remarkable range of words which refer to madness and to those who have such mental conditions about them.
MADNESS,
LUNACY, INSANITY... The descriptive language of the condition of
mental health. Someone who is MAD may be considered to be nutty,
crazy, loony, loopy, wacko, bonkers, demented;
These words have a history to them. But we the people who are MAD
know that we have a talent that is beyond the normal. So whilst
we may be exhibiting the mental symptoms of psychosis,
schizophrenia, nuttiness, dementia, craziness, and silliness, we
know that it is the sanity and normality that is over-rated and
that since ancient times, FOOLS have been clever. The old word
"silly" meant "blessed", and in the Tarot
pack of cards, The Fool is the character who is ultimately clever!
And though it may seem silly to have a page on a website with a
lot of mad words in, it is the search engines that have been daft
by banishing pages which have keywords that aren't in the text!
See, I'm a schizophrene myself, and I created the page of MAD LINKS a long time ago. It's
about user-empowerment and self-management, and generally good
ideas about the lunatics taking over the asylum. But then, these
sane people who decide what we see and what we don't on the
searching decided that you can't say keywords=nutty, loopy, round
the bend, crazy, wacky, psychological mental illness... without
actually putting the words in the page, which of course on a page
like MAD
LINKS
would be unacceptable because it would play up the paranoia of
some of us, and it would offend some of the carers, and it would
be very distracting from the actual content of the page, which
links to a great many useful mental health resources. So, get
around such gross application of sanity, there is some practical
madness in the creation of this page of insane words, for surely
the folk out there who are so rash as to put such terms as ROUND
THE BEND into a search box should be shown the truth about
madness and arrive at a page which boasts of the benefits of the
madness!
As well as being a paranoid schizophrenic, I'm also a success in business. I like to think it's the fact that a multi-track mind can write stuff so folk can understand it. For example, who, in their right mind, could write a page explaining why you never see baby pigeons?!
There
are shops who see madness in a quite different commercial light,
and feel that by naming their business in a way that infers the
people running the business are insane, they may attract more
customers.
This is a much simpler
mode of application of the idea of insanity to capitalist
profitability, and is generally a very basic notion that the
prices in the shop are very cheap on account of madness, not for
commercially sensible reasons. Interestingly, there is quite a
lot of this "mad shop" business. I have taken the
trouble to list a few here... Mad Shops
Extra note of detail: The "mad shops" may not actually have any actual lunacy about them at all, apart from in the name. In contrast, I really am a mad person.