take leave of one's senses
English
Pronunciation
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Verb
take leave of one's senses (third-person singular simple present takes leave of one's senses, present participle taking leave of one's senses, simple past took leave of one's senses, past participle taken leave of one's senses)
- (idiomatic) To go crazy; to stop behaving rationally.
- 1868 January 4 – June 6, [William] Wilkie Collins, “Second Period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848–1849.) […] [Fourth Narrative. Extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings.]”, in The Moonstone. A Romance. […], volume III, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], published 1868, →OCLC, pages 180–181:
- Here I am, with my book and my pencil—the latter not pointed so well as I could wish, but when Christians take leave of their senses, who is to expect that pencils will keep their points?
- 1880, [Henry Brooks Adams], chapter X, in Democracy: An American Novel (Leisure-hour Series; no. 112), New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC, page 256:
- She plainly said that men seemed to take leave of their senses as soon as women were concerned; […]
- 1920 March, L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery, “Her Father’s Daughter”, in Further Chronicles of Avonlea, Boston, Mass.: The Page Company, →OCLC, page 43:
- Rachel Spencer, have you taken leave of your senses? What do you mean by such nonsense as this?
- 2005 May 8, Nancy Gibbs, "Midlife Crisis? Bring It On!," Time:
- Sue Shellenbarger was 49, living in Oregon and writing her "Work & Family" column for the Wall Street Journal, when in the space of two years she got divorced, lost her father, drained her bank account and developed a taste for wilderness camping and ATV riding that left her crumpled up on an emergency-room gurney. "People around me thought I'd taken leave of my senses," she says.
- 2007, HRH The Prince of Wales, The Elements of Organic Gardening, Kales Press, page 7:
- One of the great difficulties associated with the adoption of organic or, perhaps more appropriately, sustainable principles at the time I started turned out to be convincing others that you had not taken complete leave of your senses.