When it’s fifteen degrees Fahrenheit below zero, anybody venturing out would be wise to wear a hat. If they can’t find a hat — or if hats are not a fashion statement they’re comfortable with — a wig might be an alternative. After all, in many ways a wig is very much like a hat.
The word “wig” entered English in the 1600s and had the same meaning it does today; fake hair. But “wig” is really just a shortened version of the older word “periwig,” which also meant fake hair, but more specifically the special white-powdered wig worn by judges and lawyers in England. “Periwig” came from the French word “perruque,” which meant both fake hair AND a real head of natural hair. Nobody knows where “perruque” came from, but the OED speculates that it might be derived from “perroquet,” which means parakeet — and some parakeets have prominent feathered crests on their heads, which might have something to do with it.
In England, meanwhile, the practice of wearing wigs as symbols of authority has continued for centuries; they still wear them today in court. In the 17th and 18th centuries, though, it wasn’t just lawyers and judges who wore wigs. Many people in roles with less authority also wore wigs, although their wigs tended to be less elaborate. For some reason, it took until the 19th century for the (pretty obvious) slang term “bigwig” to show up. It means somebody important, whether they wear a fancy wig or not. Later on in the 1900s, if you were rebuked by a “bigwig,” it was called a “wigging”.
Here in North America we also have “wigging” as in “wigging out”, but it’s not the same thing at all. On this side of the Atlantic, “wig” came to have the slang sense of a person’s brain or mind. In the 1930s the term “flip one’s wig” was used to either mean losing your temper or your self-control in some emotional outburst. Over the next few decades several other wig-related slang expressions arose. You could not only flip your wig, but snap, crack, or blow it, and whichever one happened you might land in “wig city” (a mental institution), where you’d be examined by a “wig picker” (psychologist). In the 1950s all the wig-related possibilities were informally trimmed down to “wigging out;” a catchall term for going nuts in some obvious way. As you approached that state, if anybody noticed how stressed you seemed to be, you’d be called “wiggy.” It can be quite the hairy situation.
