basket case
19
7.8
- noun
- /ˈbæskɪt keɪs/
- Offensive
:
caso perdido
- After losing his job and going through a tough breakup, he felt like a basket case and couldn’t face his friends.
- an economic basket case
I refuse to be a basket case or buy into the hype.
- I refuse to be a basket case or buy into the hype.
- And now it's it's a basket case.
- Because I've had friends that have gone through far less and they become basket cases and you don't want that to happen.
- I'll give you a good example as a counter point to Afghanistan as a a place that wasn't a basket case.
Examples
-
Sure enough, her husband became an emotional basket case, and the military decided he wasn't fit to serve.
Blog text (1) -
She's a total basket case.
-
John, you sound like a basket case.
-
Just what they need-- another basket case.
-
Some of them are basket cases now.
-
This guy's a basket case.
-
It's perhaps not the basket case people thought it was just two weeks ago.
Blog text (10) -
Man, I was a basket case that weekend.
Fiction book (1995) -
Britain is an absolute basket case.
-
And I'm a basket case.
Surface Forms
Morphology
basket + case
The meaning 'a person who is unable to cope / a situation in complete failure' cannot be predicted from the literal constituents 'basket' (a container) and 'case' (a situation/instance); the combination does not transparently signal inability or disarray. This is an idiomatic/metaphorical sense (historically specific) and is not cross‑linguistically obvious, so a B1 learner who only knows the parts would not reliably infer the meaning.
Etymology
Basket case may come from World War I, when very wounded soldiers who could not move were sometimes carried in a basket or case to take them to safety. So the strong picture of someone helpless in a basket gave the phrase the meaning 'unable to cope' or a situation that is a 'complete mess'.