In the shower this morning, I noticed that my shower gel was inviting me to ‘unwind’, clearly meaning that I ought to relax. This got me thinking: what if I were to ‘unwind’ so far that I ‘came undone’?

I’ve always understood ‘come undone’ to be a slightly dated euphemism for developing psychiatric illness. It seemed strange that ‘unwinding’ would have such positive psychological connotations, while a superficially similar phrase would have such negative connotations in the same field.

Perhaps if someone ’unwinds’ too far, they fall apart? Perhaps it’s a hangover from dated social attitudes: when being ‘buttoned up’ was positive, ‘coming undone’ would be negative, but perhaps we’re all a little more suspicious of being reserved today?

Once I was out of the shower, I obviously reached for the dictionary. Don’t we all?

The OED reckons that ‘unwind’ in this sense is relatively new, first noted in 1958. Figurative words like ‘unbend’ and ‘slacken’ have a much longer history of usage, but I can see why they wouldn’t work quite so well on a modern bottle of shower gel.

To ‘come undone’ is a little older, from 1899, but doesn’t actually mean what I thought it did. It means something more like a reversal of fortunes: a good thing is done and then becomes undone. A previously well-performing horse suddenly loses a race, for example, or a previously successful plan falls apart. So when we talk of people coming undone, there’s nothing specifically psychiatric in that at all: ‘coming undone’ could equally mean losing a fortune, for example.

It would be fascinating to re-read whatever I’ve read in the past that has led me to this bizarrely incorrect interpretation… but I can’t think of any specific examples to reassess!

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.