If you say that someone has lost their marbles, you either mean that they can’t find their marbles, or that they’re crazy, mad, incompetent, are losing their mind, or are suffering from a mental illness.
It’s not known exactly when or why losing one’s marbles came to be associated with losing one’s mind. One early example that connects marbles with mental capicity appears in a story from April 1898 in The Portsmouth Times, a newspaper from Ohio in the USA:
Prot. J. M. Davis, of Rio Grande college, was selected to present J. W Jones as Gallia’s candidate, but got his marbles mixed and did as much for the institution of which he is the noted head as he did for his candidate.
By the early 20th century, losing or not having all one’s marbles was commonly associated with a decent into madness. For example, American Speech, Vol. 2, No. 8 (May, 1927) has a collection of dialect words from West Virginia that includes the definition:
marbles, doesn’t have all his (verb phrase), mentally deficient. “There goes a man who doesn’t have all his marbles.”
One French equivalent of this idiom is perdre la boule, which literally means ‘to lose the ball’.
Other ways to say this in French include:
- perdre le nord = ‘to lose the north’ – see also Losing the North
- perdre la boussole = ‘to lose the compass’
- perdre la raison = ‘to lose the reason’
- perdre le sens commun = ‘to lose the common sense’
- se perdre les oies = ‘to lose the geese’
- péter les plombs = ‘to blow the fuses’
- péter un câble = ‘to blow a cable’
Incidentally, perdre comes from the same root as the English word perdition (eternal damnation, hell, absolute run, downfall).
Are there interesing ways to say that someone has lost their marbles in other languages?
Sources:
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lose-your-marbles.html
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perdre_la_boule#French
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perdo#Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perdition#English