wild about Rappaccini's Daughter

[Jonathan Lighter]

OED has the constr. "wild about" (def. 11c, a bit mildly defined) from 1868
only: the early preference seems to have been for "wild after."

Hawthorne, however, used the current idiom in "Rappaccini's Daughter" in
1844:

"You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild
about."

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org