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A fool, a stupid person. Someone acting in a frivolous manner.


Stephanie.

Where barmy comes from?

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Mel

Searching for lost relatives? Win the Lottery!

I would think so.


Stephanie.

yabut...frome whence cometh the word 'barm' in the first place?

Dont think the word 'barm' stood alone it was either barm pot, barm cake or plain barmy.


Stephanie.

Barm was actually the stuff they used as a raising agent in the barm cakes. I don't think it's the same as yeast, but somewhere on the same lines.

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Maureen
If you can't fight, wear a big 'at

From Wikipedia:

"Barm is the foam, or scum, formed on the top of liquor (i.e. fermented alcoholic beverages such as beer or wine, or feedstock for hard liquor or industrial ethanol distillation) when fermenting. It was used to leaven bread, or set up fermentation in a new batch of liquor. Barm, as a leaven, has also been made from ground millet combined with must out of wine-tubs and is sometimes used in English baking as a synonym for a natural leaven. Various cultures derived from barm, usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae, became ancestral to most forms of brewer's yeast and baker's yeast currently on the market.

In parts of the North of England a barm or barm cake is a common term for a soft, floury bread roll. This is a regional term: other areas describe an identical roll as a "bap", "bread bun", "bread cake", "blaa" (Ireland) or many other variants. It is applied equally to yeast-leavened bread, without implying anything the use of sourdough or barm leavens."

So now we know (what someone thinks - Wikipedia isn't always authoritative, but this looks OK)

Charon

Someone's a reet clever clogs......na then!