"as a box of frogs"

[fredpuli47]

Where has the current expression "mad as a box of frogs" come from? Is it an old or local saying? Why "frogs"?

[Quizmonster]

Box of Frogs was the name of a rock-group formed by ex-members of The Yardbirds in the early 1980s. They didn't last long and I have no idea whether they were expecially 'mad', but that may be where the phrase you ask about came from. More likely, perhaps, that it is just a humorous variation on 'can of worms' ...ie a wriggling, writhing mass that is unlikely to do you any good!

[chairobyx16]

Dont know how old but I suppose when a jumping frog lands on another it sets off a chain reaction rather like the roomful of mousetraps loaded and set with pingpong balls -one sets off others - demonstrating a neuclear reaction!

[paddywak]

Don't know about mad, I've always heard the expression as Ugly as a box of frogs, going back to the sixties

[Quizmonster]

Mad as cheese, mad as hops, mad as a pink balloon and - the old standby - daft as a brush all show that such sayings are, in themselves, effectively 'mad'! Where any of them actually came from is almost certainly untraceable and any attempt to find a logical explanation for them self-defeating.

[fredpuli47]

QM :"Daft as a brush" ? This was a catchphrase of Ken Platt, a Lancastrian 'flat cap' comedian, famous on radio in the 1950s. He had experimented with other versions of "'as a brush" the starting point being another "daft as.." , a local saying where the noun was a word of Lancastrian dialect , which he thought too obscure for a general audience.

So we do know exacty where "Daft as a brush" came from.
And now, as he used to say when opening his act, "Allo, I won't take me coat off. I'm not staying" :)

[fredpuli47]

That should have been "I'm not stopping" not "staying". Must be exact on Answerbank. Don't know what came over me. I remember it from childhood as 'stopping'. I even saw Ken Platt using it when playing the Savoy Theatre at Clacton-on-Sea. I'm daft as a brush.

[Quizmonster]

Fair enough, Fred, but who had created the other Lancastrian-word version Platt merely borrowed and modified? That was really my point about untraceability...so far and no further.

My guess is that 'mad as hops' derives from 'hopping mad'. So, where does 'mad as cheese' come from?


I obviously don't know what sort of box Chairobyx envisages re the 'frogs' saying, but I myself picture a relatively small and tightly-packed one...shoebox-sized, say. Certainly, I don't see one with ample room for the frogs within to leap about!

But what the hey!

[Quizmonster]

I've decided to create one of my own...'mad as a tartan tiger'. Loads of assonance and alliteration...should catch on. You heard it here first, folks!

[pixie71]

im guess sing if u put a lot of frogs in a box.... they would get "hopping mad" hehehehe