Way With Words: Run Amok

What do daycares, schools and supermarkets have in common? That children are constantly ‘running amok’ as adults sigh helplessly.

In today’s language ‘run amok’ typically refers to ‘going crazy,’ and many times in reference to children.

However, the word ‘amok’ never seems to show up in any other phrase or context, it is used solely in the idiom ‘run amok.’

That’s because ‘amok’ is not an English word, or middle English word, instead it comes from the Malaysian and Indonesian islands where an ‘Amok’ was a warrior who raged in a murderous frenzy.

The idea was that a cowardly death would offend the gods, while the courageous became favored.

Phrases.uk.org cites one of the first English encounters with the ‘Amoks.’

“Captain James Cook, in his account of his travels in that part of the world - Voyages, 1772, gives an explicit definition of 'run amok': "To run amock is to get drunk with opium... to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage.”

Be thankful that when someone cries ‘the children are running amok’ that they are not hyped up on opium trying to die an honorable death.