Are You Hairbrained or Harebrained?

Or perhaps you are perfectly logical, practical, not given to the occasional flight of fancy or crackpot scheme. Poor you. If, however, you do get a little loopy once in a while, you can call yourself and your scheme either hairbrained or harebrained.

Approximately three minutes ago, I learned that hairbrained is an accepted, but rare, variant of harebrained. Heck, even Lord Byron used hairbrained, according to Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage. So, to all those authors (I think there are at least two of you) who have written hairbrained only to have me change it to harebrained to save you from looking silly, I’m sorry. I was wrong, sort of. In my defense, I would argue that an accepted variant isn’t quite the same thing as a standard spelling. I would also argue that the notion of having hair on one’s brain makes my head itch in a most uncomfortable manner. So I will stick with harebrained. But, hey, you do what you want.