"Banana head" means a stupid person according to Farlex Idioms. Where did this idiom come from?
From Farlex:
n. a stupid person. (Usually objectionable.) Ask that banana-head why she is wearing a coat like that in July.
Learn English – What’s the origin of the idiom ” Banana head”
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Related Solutions
As this NGram shows, thumb was once less common than fingers. For some reason people have never been particularly keen on thumbs or finger, but they get used too. As Neil Coffey commented, fingers remains more common in British English.
Green hands do in fact exist too, but sometimes simply alluding to the inexperience of general-purpose unskilled employees. I think thumb wins out in the end because the singular is a bit simpler, and thumbs don't have so many other associations that might confuse the imagery.
My chart combines US and UK usage figures, but looking at the patterns for each country separately makes it clear that US thumb and UK fingers became far more dominant in their respective countries from about the 1940s, with little change in usage figures for whatever word was being used on the other side of the pond. I think this may be a result of increased commercialisation of "domestic horticulture" at the time. This probably led to a proliferation of books, magazines, local clubs, etc., and these by their very nature would be far more likely to encourage standardisation around an easily-recognised term.
Thus it may be little more than a fluke that the US standardised on a different term - if neither was particularly well known before, either would be happily embraced by commercial and social networking interests. But standardisation would be very much encouraged thereafter, whichever form happened to have taken the early lead.
Obviously a gardener spends a lot of time handling plant material, much of which is green and might therefore stain one's digits. Since the metaphorical usage is so transparent, it could be re-coined many times. It would normally be understood on first hearing, and often passed on by the hearer, so the expression could have had multiple opportunities to both germinate and thrive.
I'm afraid I may know where the negative meaning comes from. People of weak stomach are recommended not to read...
The name probably comes from adolescent boys' game of "limp biscuit" (which is, by the way, the origin of the name of the famous band, Limp Bizkit). The gist of the game is to gather forming a circle and masturbate , ejaculating on a biscuit placed in the middle (...and it softens from moisture in semen in the process, thus "limp"), and then the person that fails to or is last to ejaculate must eat that biscuit.
Expectably, "taking the biscuit" is not a thing to be proud of.
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Best Answer
From J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994):
The epithet appears twice in a short span of text in The Asphalt Jungle (1949) [combined snippets]:
In this exchange, it appears that Angela has made up the insult on the spot, and that Andrews has never heard it before.
An interesting alternative source of the term appears in the context of a series of preventive folk measures taken by members of an unidentified culture, in Folk, volumes 8–9 (1966) [snippet view]:
Unfortunately, the lack of context for this excerpt makes it difficult to assess what influence, if any, the phenomenon of neonatal "banana head" may have had on the emergence of the insult term.