If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and are experiencing extreme heat for the first time, I have some Australian phrases you might find unpleasantly useful.
Content note: These are inherently ableist terms. At the same time, they describe a phenomenon which can happen to absolutely anyone, given sufficient heat. Both of these statements are true at once.
For examples of heat causing madness in fiction:
- MASS HEAT MADNESS: Do The Right Thing directed by Spike Lee (1989): On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone’s hate and bigotry smoulders and builds until it explodes into violence.
- SINGULAR HEAT MADNESS: The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942): In this novella an indifferent settler in French Algeria kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers while disoriented and on the edge of heatstroke.
GOING TROPPO
In Australia, when heat sends someone into a frenzy this is colloquially known as “going troppo“, short for “tropical”. It is common in Australian English to shorten words and then add ‘o’ at the end, and has no relation at all to the Italian word for ‘too much’.
I think going troppo is a real thing.
Dr Mary Morris, a senior psychology lecturer at Charles Darwin University
Although ‘going troppo’ originally meant ‘mad from the heat of the tropics’, in Australia the phrase has come to mean ‘crazy in general’. This equates to ‘going postal’ in USA English, except ‘going postal’ started with a singular event whereas ‘going troppo’ describes a widely experienced phenomenon.
Other examples of similar Australian abbreviations:
- arvo (afternoon)
- smoko (smoke break)
- bottle-o (liquor store)
- servo (service station)
The word ‘drongo’ is a slightly outdated Australian insult which isn’t short for anything but also happens to end in ‘o’.
MANGO MADNESS
New research has linked tropical heat with higher rates of anxiety, stress and hostility, as well as fewer hours of sleep, reduced appetite and lower energy levels.
The study has been released as northern Australia enter the monsoonal build-up – the period of extreme weather tension known locally as “mango madness”.
Mango madness: Tropical seasonal affective disorder linked to stress and depression, research finds (2014)
‘Mango madness’ has subsequently become the name for cannabis which is grown alongside (and hidden by) mango crops in Australia. The product winds up smelling vaguely of mangoes.
More context for the King of the Hill cartoon:
