That's What They Say

The dark origin of "basket case"


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It's jarring when you discover that a seemingly harmless everyday word or phrase has an offensive origin story. The Oxford Dictionary's blog has a list of nine words with offensive origins. You probably already know about a few of these, but others such as "no can do" and "long time no see" may come as a surprise. One that caught our eye is "basket case." The first citation of "basket case" in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1919, soon after the end of World War I. It came from rumors about
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That's What They SayBy Anne Curzan, Rebecca Hector

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