go bananas

English

Etymology

From bananas (“crazy”).

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Verb

go bananas (third-person singular simple present goes bananas, present participle going bananas, simple past went bananas, past participle gone bananas)

1. (idiomatic, informal) To get angry; to go mad.

   I just told her she couldn’t have any pudding until after dinner, and she went bananas!

2. (idiomatic, informal) To become silly or excited; to go crazy.
   • 1982 August, Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; 3), London: Pan Books, →ISBN, page 49:

     The music was going bananas with immensity at this point.

   • 2023 June 6, Ian Bogost, “The Age of Goggles Has Arrived”, in The Atlantic‎^[1]:

     As my colleague Glenn MacDonald, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me when I asked him if all these tech companies had gone bananas, “It all depends on how you think about risk aversion.”

Synonyms

• go ape
• go nuts

Translations

get angry

• Danish: gå agurk
• Swedish: bli tokig (sv), gå i taket (sv), få tuppjuck (sv), få psykbryt (sv), kuka ur (sv)

become very excited

• Danish: gå bananas
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: gå bananas

  Nynorsk: gå bananas

• Swedish: gå bananas (sv)