RE: the warning at the beginning of this post — I support including it. I am virulently against any form of censorship, but recognize that not everyone carries that same standard. Therefore, it is appropriate to let people know what they’re about to step in BEFORE they get their foot dirty (ex. ratings on movies). Granted, we are supposed to all be adults here, but just because a person is over a certain age doesn’t mean they want to be exposed to things they would find objectionable.

Thanks everyone for joining in.

That is precisely how it was used in my friend’s email, actually. She had decided something quite impetuously and was emailing me about it. Thus, the “I got a wild hair about me to [do what she emailed about].” (It was meant to be “I got…” also, meaning that she had the idea in the past, which is how you usually hear that particular phrase in our “neck of the woods”. While it may not make sense to people grammatically, it is the way the saying generally is phrased.)

It just might be a colloquial issue, as we do tend to say “I got a wild hair about me” (or “She got a wild hair about her”) when we talk about doing something impetuously; however, we say “He has a wild hair up his rear” when we mean that someone was acting in a rude manner by not letting an issue go. For example, if a friend went to Paris for the weekend in a spur-of-the-moment decision, we say that she got a wild hair about her to go to Paris last weekend. If a person comes into my office and starts harping about something that no one else cares about, I might look at another coworker after the other person leaves and say, “Man, he has a wild hair up his rear today, doesn’t he?”

I’m thinking it is regional, as my husband hadn’t heard the phrase before, which really made me think about what it meant and how it originated.

The conclusion seems to be ” take your pick”