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“Blowing a gasket” means losing control of one’s temper. The phrase comes from engines, where a gasket prevents liquids from escaping between metal fittings. When it blows, liquid escapes, creating steam. There is no warning before it happens, similar to “blowing a fuse.” Both phrases are relatively modern and likely originated in the United States with the rise of automobiles and electrical systems.
“Blowing a gasket” means that someone has lost control of their temper or has become very angry. In most cases, the idiom means that the person got enraged very quickly, which harks back to the literal meaning of the sentence. Literally, when a gasket is blown, steam is released almost immediately.
The phrase comes from the mechanics of engines. A gasket is a gasket on an engine that is fitted between two pieces of metal. The purpose of the gasket is to prevent liquids, usually gasoline or water, from escaping the metal fittings. When a gasket blows, liquid escapes between pieces of metal, usually creating steam as the liquid hits hot metal. This is reminiscent of the idiom of “steam coming out of his ears”, which also describes someone who is very angry,
There’s no warning in the machinery that a gasket is about to blow. When it blows, which means it breaks or gets lost from its place among the pieces of metal, it happens suddenly. When a person is said to blow a gasket, the anger being described usually occurs without any warning that the person was about to become so enraged.
A very similar saying is “blowing a fuse”. A fuse would blow in a building’s power system when an electrical circuit overloaded. Like when a gasket blows, a fuse suddenly blows and there is little warning before it happens.
Both phrases are believed to have their origins in the United States. Blowing a gasket probably entered common parlance as a figurative phrase about the time when the use of automobiles became common. Most people, sooner or later, would have seen what happened when an automobile blew a gasket. Blowing a fuse would become commonplace as more and more people had electrical systems in their homes and saw what happened when a fuse would blow.
As idioms go, both blowing a gasket and blowing a fuse are relatively modern additions to the common English language. Since machinery using gaskets, especially automobile engines, and electrical systems using fuses didn’t come into use until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the literal meanings of the phrases are probably less than a hundred years old. as of 19. Their uses figuratively are still much younger because they would not have come into common use until most speakers were familiar with what it meant when a gasket or fuse blown. Compared to proverbs and idioms that have been a part of the language for centuries, this makes both phrases quite modern.
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