out of one's box

out of one's box

English

Prepositional phrase

out of one's box

1. (idiomatic) Crazy; unhinged; irrational.
   • 1966, Jay Neugeboren, Big Man, Mariner Books (2000), →ISBN, page 54:

     Then she got a leg behind my knee and crash! I'm on the floor and she's flying on top of me, screaming like a maniac. I cover my face, trying to take deep breaths and all of a sudden she's flush on me, her mouth at my ear, laughing like hell with her fingers working on my ribs. Then I'm laughing too. "You're out of your box, girl," I say.

   • 2001, Miranda Speranza Masocco Levy, "The Belle of the Ball", Turn Left at the Sleeping Dog: Scripting the Santa Fe Legend, 1920-1955 (ed. John Pen La Farge), University of New Mexico Press (2006), →ISBN, page 331:

     Deep down, I didn't think it would succeed. I probably listened to too many people saying, "Mirandi, you're out of your box!"

   • 2005, Caroline Foulkes, "Spend It Like Beckham", The Birmingham Post, 31 August 2005:

     As with so many things in this life, when it comes to shopping, men are from Marks and women are from Venus (you know gents, Venus, that vintage boutique in that arcade where you sat bored out of your box one Saturday afternoon when you could have been watching that crucial Villa/Blues/Baggies game).

   • For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:out of one's box.
2. (idiomatic) Stoned or intoxicated.
   • 1997, Kirk Lane, Never Hit the Ground, Pulp (1997), →ISBN, page 10:

     And Christ anyway, you trust her judgment? She's out of her box man. Fried.

   • 2001, Mark Steel, Reasons to Be Cheerful: From Punk to New Labour Through the Eyes of a Dedicated Troublemaker, Scribner (2001), →ISBN, page 94:

     And I'd be quietly filing, recalling that around that time I was dragging a wardrobe out of a ski with a biker who kept screaming like a wolf because he was out of his box on magic mushrooms […]

   • 2012, Robert Sellers, An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety, Preface Publishing (2010), →ISBN, unnumbered page:

     It was hard to tell sometimes with Junius Booth whether he was just plain insane or merely out of his box on booze, so famed was he for his eccentric nature.

   • For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:out of one's box.

Synonyms

• (crazy): see also Thesaurus:insane.
• (drunk): see also Thesaurus:drunk or Thesaurus:stoned.