mayhem
Formsmayhems, mayheming, mayhemed
- 1A situation in which things are wildly confused and disorderly, or in which trouble and destruction break out.
A burst water main caused mayhem during the morning rush hour.
Amid the mayhem of moving day, nobody noticed that the cat had slipped out.
Similarchaos, bedlam, disorder, confusion, shambles
Note
The everyday sense is the mildest in the family. The word came through Anglo-Norman mahaim, "mutilation", from Old French for bodily harm or the loss of a limb, and the legal crime of maiming still keeps that meaning. Here it has softened into chaos, usually something caused: a storm causes mayhem, and children are separated from their parents in all the mayhem.
- 2The infliction of violent injury or damage on a person or thing.
Raccoons wreaked mayhem on the garbage cans, ripping every bag open.
Critics complained that the film lingers on bloody mayhem for two full hours.
Similarhavoc, destruction, carnage, violence
Note
This sense keeps the violence without the legal definition, so dogs can create mayhem in flower beds and raccoons can wreak it on garbage cans. It also stretches to harm that is not physical, as in Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908), where giving up personal feelings for professional ones is proposed as "a sort of spiritual mayhem".
- 3The maiming of a person by depriving them of the use of a limb needed for defense or protection.
Prosecutors added a charge of mayhem because the victim lost the use of his right hand.
The defendant was convicted of mayhem for crushing the shopkeeper's fingers with a hammer.
Similarmaiming, mutilation
Note
The common-law test was whether the injury weakened a person in a fight: disabling an arm, a hand or a finger counted, while a scar alone did not. Arthur Cheney Train's Courts and Criminals (1912) calls it "the unusual crime" in a case of a bitten-off finger. The verb is commit, sometimes with upon, a phrasing Wodehouse borrows for comic effect in Piccadilly Jim (1917).
Less common meaning
- 4To commit mayhem; to maim a person.
Court records show that he mayhemed a farmhand in a quarrel over wages.
the king shal punish him for mayheming of his subject
1628, Edw[ard] Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England.Note
Edward Coke still writes the verb in The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628), where the king will punish a man "for mayheming of his subject". Today it is archaic: legal writing says that someone committed mayhem, and everyday English has maim for the action itself.
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Origin
From Middle English mayme, mahaime, from Anglo-Norman mahaim ("mutilation"), from Old French meshaing ("bodily harm, loss of limb"), from Proto-Germanic *maidijaną ("to cripple, injure"), from Proto-Indo-European *mey- ("to change"); compare Old Norse meiða ("to injure") and see mad. Another possible origin traces the Old French to Provençal maganhar, from mal ("evil") + ganhar ("to obtain, receive"), literally "to receive something evil". It first meant the crime of maiming, and the sense "chaos" may have arisen from a popular misunderstanding of the journalese phrase "rioting and mayhem".