The more technically advanced machines we surround ourselves with, the more familiar we seem to get with one thing or another going haywire. But just hold on…”going haywire?”
Before duct tape was a handy way to repair just about anything, there was hay wire. It was the wire used to hold bales of hay together, and it had countless other uses. It’s still around, but now it’s called “baling wire,” and since we have duct tape, it’s not used as the universal fixer that it was in the late 1800s.
One place the stuff was liberally employed was logging camps, as recorded by Stewart Holbrook: “No logging camp could operate without axes, and in time it came to be that no camp could operate without haywire. This wire was the stuff with which hay for the oxen and horses was bound into bales, for compact toting into the distant camps. … Loggers used the strands to strengthen an axe helve or to wind the split handle of a peavey. Cooks strung haywire above the stove over which to dry clothes and to hang ladles; and often to bind the very stove together. In the zither era, so old-timers have vowed, a length of haywire came in handy to replace a broken string, and they say never was a more resonant G sounded, clear and deep as any harp.” (I admit I don’t know what a helve or a peavey might be.)
Logging has always been a business you could try to get into without having new equipment in good repair. In the late 1800s, if you could find a few guys with old axes, some horses, a couple of wagons that would keep rolling for at least a few hours, and of course a bunch of hay wire, you could set off into the woods to try to make your fortune. The haywire was really necessary in those circumstances, because old, worn-out tools tend to break.
Logging teams like these — and other poorly-equipped business ventures — came to be called, around 1900, “haywire outfits.” And by 1921, the term had taken on the meaning we’re familiar with today: “The only thing that can be said in favor of the electric light company when the lights go out is, perhaps, its inability to make the meter go around when the juice has gone haywire.”
By 1928, “haywire” was being applied to people, too, including a basketball team: “…their anxiety to score let their passing game go haywire with many wild heaves finding marks in the bleachers.” For a while in the 1920s it was even used as a synonym for “crazy,” as in “I’m crazy about you:” “I didn’t come out here tonight to lie to you. I’ve gone hay-wire about you, and I’ve come to tell you so.”
Nowadays the percentage of people in the US who work on farms — or have ever visited a farm, for that matter — has dropped to single digits, and I’m pretty sure hay bales are now wrapped in plastic, not wire. But “haywire” is still with us, even though it’s not the handy fix-it-up solution it used to be. I wonder if that means that in a few decades the expression “it’s gone duct tape” will be appear?
