On language: crack up

With the Valentine coming up, it is fitting to put this Peanuts comic strip on my “On language” series.  “Crack” has so many diverse meanings; “crack up” hear means having a nervous breakdown; “crack up” also means “to cause to laugh out loud”, such as that joke really cracks me up.  Charlie Brown’s infatuation with that red-haired girl is more comical than romantic; i.e. a laughing matter for all.  Charles Schulz used “crack up” very well here.

The Crack-Up, a collection of essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published posthumously in 1945 after his death in 1940.  A Movable Feast was published in 1964, three years after Ernest Hemingway shot himself.