Talk:haywire

There is a very good chance that the original term was not "HAY" wire but was taken from "HAIGH" wire.

Maybe one should think about the "Haigh" wire scandal associated with the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The contractor whose last name was "Haigh" deliberately used defective wire for the bridge support and CONTINUED doing so even after being detected. The "Haigh Wire" scandal rocked New York and the country whose attention was focused on the progress of the engineering feat of the century.

Personal experience with haywire
I used to do a lot of baling as a kid, and offer this as an unofficial folk etymology.

Baling wire, or the term "hay wire" that became contracted to "haywire", was a 14.5 gauge black steel (non-galvanized) wire used for binding bales. The baling machine ("baler") wrapped two separate strands of the wire around the length and height of a rectangular hay bale measuring approximately 32" long by 16" wide by 14" high. The wire was automatically knotted by twisting together the ends of each strand, forming two loops of wire around the bale, approximately 8" apart.

The wire could indeed tangle while new, when being removed from the spool. But my perception of the term "haywire" was that it was not really related to the tangles from the spool, but from the way the wire was used after its primary use was ended.

When the hay bales were fed to animals, the wires were cut off of the bale. Given the bale size above, there would be two discard wires of 92" in length each; from each bale. These scraps accumulated as bales were fed and could not be reused for baling because (1) balers required continuous wire and (2) the unprotected black steel wire rusted quite quickly.

So the left over wire was "waste" in one sense, but it could be used parsimoniously to make repairs of all kinds: Fitting it into fences, wiring up gates, wiring things closed, and holding together almost anything that was broken. Being 14.5 gauge, it was strong enough to hold in many repairs but was easily twisted by hand (so long as one had some extra length) or with a pair of pliers. When I was a kid, we often carried wads of hay wire around, so that we we had some on hand to make such repairs.

But as you might imagine, things repaired with rusting black steel wire, with randomly twisted "closures." tended to look as if they were held together at random. Also, hay wire repairs tended to be unreliable, since the baling wire rusted severely, rusting through and/or becoming brittle over as little as 18 months, so that these repairs tended to fail unexpectedly at some point (though they might hold for years).

From this usage was derived the general term "haywire" as related to the results of using hay wire. As I recall from my childhood, there were actually these direct and derived usages:


 * "hay wire" the noun, usually not contracted to haywire but spoken verbally as separate words, describing the wire itself. "We need to fix the fence. Grab some hay wire." Note a distinction here: The new wire on a spool for use in a baler was uniformly called baling wire. After it was cut off a bale it was frequently called "hay wire" (though in the latter case it could sometimes still be called baling wire).
 * "haywire" the adjective, describing something much fixed by hay wire. That fence is all haywire.
 * "haywire" the adverb, describing a device that has broken: "The combine has gone haywire." It is important to note for this usage that the term did not always imply the problem could be fixed with hay wire; therefore this usage meant only "broken".

During the late '60s and early '70s the expense of baling wire increased drastically. Newer balers of the rectangular bale format were therefore commonly made to use polyethylene twine instead of wire (and by this period, the rectangular format was itself going out of vogue in favor of the large round bales now used most commonly). Discontinuing the use of wire for baling meant no wire bales, no hay wire scraps, and hence no hay wire repairs. (Wire was still used for repairs, but not hay wire, since that was no longer available.)

It's my guess that the term haywire will disappear over the next couple of generations, due to declining use. --CoyneT (talk) 06:32, 5 July 2014 (UTC)