There’s a particular kind of behaviour that overtakes people in extreme heat – a slight unravelling, a loosening of the usual social wiring, a tendency to do or say things that wouldn’t normally make it past the filter, and even more extreme than that. Australians have a word for this: we call it going troppo.
So what does ‘going troppo’ actually mean?
Before you ask: no, it has nothing to do with the Italian troppo meaning ‘too much’, though the weather that often goes with it is best described as troppo.
‘Going troppo’ is classic Australian slang for losing the plot – going a bit crazy, erratic or unravelled, originally thanks to extended exposure to brutal heat and humidity.
It has its origins from World War II when Australian soldiers were stationed in the Pacific and Southeast Asia (especially Borneo). It described what happened to blokes who’d grown up in Australia’s relatively temperate south and were then dropped into relentless, suffocating tropical heat with no relief in sight. The isolation didn’t help either. Cabin fever, mental fatigue and a climate that simply does not let up will eventually make anyone act strange. ‘Troppo’ – short for ‘tropical’ (on brand for Australian English) – became shorthand for that specific flavour of heat-induced madness.
Mad for mangoes?
You don’t actually need a war zone to experience this, though. Australia’s own tropical north delivers a domestic version every year, particularly in the ‘build-up’ or ‘hot season’ – the suffocating stretch of October, November and December before the wet season (i.e. ‘the Wet’) finally breaks. The heat is intense and the humidity oppressive that the uninitiated start going bonkers. People in Australia’s north have a more specific term for this phenomenon: mango madness 🥭 – named, fittingly, for mango season which coincides with these peak temperatures, peak humidity and peak erratic behaviour.
In the end, you don’t need a tropical posting or a build-up season to qualify. All it can take is a stretch of weather that’s a bit too much, such as a string of unbearably hot and humid days where everyone’s patience runs thin and behaviour gets a little strange.
But what does the science say?
The ABC, Australia’s public broadcaster, looked into whether people really go crazy during intense hot and humid weather. Police figures show slight upswings in violence and assaults. Dr Kerstin Zander from Charles Darwin University’s Northern Institute said increased temperatures and humidity do impact behaviour and disrupt routines, and that her studies have proven that. Many scientists and academics though agree, Dr Zander included, that more research is required. Still, Dr Zander did say what we all think: ‘it is common sense that heat can make us more irritated and crankier.’ Ask anyone whose been in a 30+ degrees heatwave in northern Europe, where the infrastructure is designed to keep the heat in, and they’ll wholeheartedly agree.
From war zones to weird vibes
Over time, ‘going troppo’ in Australia had shed most of its military and meteorological origins and has become something more universal. According to the Macquarie Dictionary, the go-to guide for Australian English, its definition of ‘troppo’ is simply ‘mentally disturbed’. But in general Australian English use, it’s now more a catch-all for anyone behaving a bit wild, unrestrained or uncharacteristically carefree, heat or no heat.
Example:
Check out Dave over there, singing loudly in the office for no reason. Seems like he’s gone a bit troppo.
That means the phrase has lost a lot of its edge and is more of an observation – unhinged but not completely lost it. This reduction in the saying’s meaning in linguistic terms is called ‘semantic bleaching’. This is when a strong, specific or clinical term loses its original intensity and becomes a colloquial, watered-down descriptor. Another example of this is how some people will excuse any small pedantic habit as ‘part of the their (undiagnosed and usually non-existent) obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)’, which in turn totally trivialises what is actually an all-encompassing, debilitating disorder for those truly diagnosed with it.
👉 How about you?
Do you feel that you’ve gone a bit troppo lately?
Or have you ever experienced mango madness and survived to tell the tale?
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