Is “harebrain” used commonly as a verb or adjective?

Question

I found the word, “harebrain” used as a verb in passive form in the following paragraph of today’s New York Times’ editorial titled “How not to plan for future”.

The agreement between Congress and the White House to virtually eliminate money for high-speed rail is harebrained. France, China, Brazil, even Russia, understand that high-speed rail is central to future development. Not Washington.

As I was totally unfamiliar with the word harebrain, I checked online dictionaries, and found the following list of the synonyms of this word in Define.com dictionary:

birdbrain, crackbrain, crank, cuckoo, ding-a-ling, featherbrain, featherhead, flibbertigibbet, giddybrain, giddyhead, kook, lunatic, nut, rattlebrain, rattlehead, and so on.

Then here’s my question, what is the exact meaning of “money for high-speed rail is harebrained”? Is harebrain used as a verb in passive form or an adjective in the above text? Is it common to use this word, which I thought to be a noun, in this way?

Incidentally, we have a phrase “a person with the brain in a match box size” as a Japanese counterpart to “harebrain,” which was actually applied to one of our former Prime ministers.

Answer 1

Harebrained is more often written as hare-brained, which makes it clearer that it doesn’t come from a root *harebrain, but is analogous to compounds like red-haired, duck-billed, flat-topped and so on.

So, it’s describing what kind of brain someone has: the brain of a hare, a proverbially daft, silly, jumpy animal. Or, by extension, it describes something that a hare-brained person might think up, or do, or support. A more common approximate synonym would be idiotic.

Hare-brained scheme in particular has become almost a cliché. Your example is very similar: “The agreement […] is hare-brained,” is saying it’s a stupid, idiotic idea.

Answer 2

It's an adjective, modifying "agreement." More commonly, though, it's used in a phrase such as "a harebrained idea."

The meaning, as you've probably gathered from that list of synonyms, is something like "ridiculous" or "nonsensical." So the editorialist is saying that it's a dumb idea.

Answer 3

The reason is that hares (ie turbocharged Rabbits) run around in the spring mating season, fighting with each other and generally behaving in an undignified manner.

So "mad as a march hare", "haring around", "harebrained" all mean something like frivolous, un-focussed, scatterbrained etc rather than directly stupid.

Answer 4

Harebrained is an adjective, often describing ideas/schemes/plans that are at least slightly, if not completely, crazy.

I've never heard of the word "harebrain", whether a verb or something else.

Answer 5

I agree with PLL et al., but I think part of your question is really about confusion regarding the part of speech, which I don't see addressed or named here elsewhere.

Is harebrain used as a verb in passive form or an adjective in the above text? Is it common to use this word, which I thought to be a noun, in this way?

In the cited text, "harebrained" has the appearance of a past participle, which is a verb form used as an adjective, as in "a frightened monkey" (where "frighten" is ordinarily a basic verb); however, I believe in this instance it is a simple adjective, and not a participle. Rephrased, the cited text might read, "...a harebrained agreement". For the word "harebrained", I believe this is typical usage, per PLL's comments.