Don't Flip Your Wig! – Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia

The famous phrase, “Don’t flip your wig” doesn’t seem to have been an eighteenth-century expression at all. Supposedly, it referred to bowing so low to one’s superior that one’s wig flipped off, but instead, the phrase seems to be a bit of twentieth-century American slang meaning “to go crazy.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the acknowledged authority on word origin, the first known use of the term occurred in 1952.