topsyturvydom

plural topsyturvydoms · alternative topsy-turvydom

1. countableuncountableA state of affairs, or a region in which everything is topsyturvy.

   At last she saw a big river, and the man who had tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it — such are the topsyturvydoms of faery glamour — in a cockleshell.

   1902, William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

   5 more examples

   But the young wife has not altogether an enviable position, for by one of those queer topsyturvydoms which occur in Japan, the mother-in-law—who, in the West, is so often the object of cheap satire—is a veritable terror in the Far East to the wife.

   1899, Literary News, volumes 20-21

   In traditions of both East and West, however, wanderlust for topsyturvydom seems to represent an alternative view of the nature of things, and it seems to embody a liberating escape from the status quo.

   1995, The Force of Vision: Dramas of desire; Visions of beauty

   [...] that it would make an oblique reference to the topsyturvydom of his own life as a child in exile in Cologne, and to the appalling topsyturvydom especially of his father's life, that of the former Alderman of Antwerp, who had died there as an exile.

   2002, Paul Oppenheimer, Rubens: A Portrait

   There was a topsy-turvydom of values, of trends and ideas—a continually changing stream which Dostoevsky began to explore, not only in its temporary aspects,but also sub specie aeternitatis.

   2014, Janko Lavrin, Tolstoy: An Approach bound with Dostoevsky: A Study

   That has to be the best review George ever had. Not all critics grasped the nature of this new opera genre, somewhere between burlesque and satire, with a 'topsy-turvydom' so prominent in Gilbert's view of the world.

   2015, Stephen Wade, A Victorian Somebody: The Life of George Grossmith