Welcome to another mind-bending episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Keep your brain in shape for the long run of life by expanding your vocabulary. Now, let's warm up those mental muscles with the Word of the Week:
Haywire: Messed-up, crazy; from the cow-country practice of twisting up loose wire before throwing it on the ground. A haywire outfit is a poorly run ranch or a logging outfit with poor equipment, which must by implication be kept together with haywire. -- "Dictionary of the American West", Winifred Blevins, Facts On File, Inc., 1993.
Example: After the kitchen sink backed up, the basement flooded and the sprinkler system failed, it didn't take a genius to see that something had gone haywire with the plumbing.
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