doolally

Photo by Mitchell Ng Liang an on Unsplash.

Doolally is a term for someone who’s a bit mad or eccentric, usually temporarily. It’s a shortened version of a British military slang expression, ‘doolally tap’. This basically means ‘camp fever’ (‘tap’ being an Urdu word for fever). The doolally part is a corruption of Deolali, the name of a military camp near Bombay (now Mumbai) in India.

Established in 1861, Deolali had a large barracks and was a chief staging point (i.e. a transit camp for troops or equipment), acting both as a training camp for soldiers who’d just arrived, and a place for British troops whose enlistments had expired to hang out while they waited for transport home. Because ships only sailed between November and March, this could mean some men stayed at Deolali for months waiting for repatriation. This is where we get the ‘losing your mind’ part from. Conditions in the camp were pretty awful – malaria was rife and soldiers were bored, driven nuts by sandflies and often afflicted with all the fun stuff you got from hanging out in the brothels and gin palaces that inevitably sprung up near to barracks (alcoholism, syphilis and other delightful venereal diseases). These men were described as being in ‘full doolally tap’, which we’ve since shortened to just ‘doolally’.

If you’re of a certain age then you might remember a 70s sitcom called ‘It Ain't Half Hot Mum’ which was set in Deolali. Like most British sitcoms from the 70s it’s since been accused of racism, homophobia and pandering to imperialism, meaning it’s now been assigned to the recycling bin of TV history.

charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”