Why “tulipomania” is a great word
An excessive, often ruinous passion for tulips, epitomized by the speculative frenzy in 17th-century Holland where contracts for single bulbs commanded fortunes before collapsing into worthlessness. From tulip (from Turkish tülbent, "turban", via French tulipe) + the connective -o- + -mania (from Greek mania, "madness, frenzy"), first attested in English in 1710 by Joseph Addison. Unlike “speculation,” a general term for financial risk, or “horticulture,” the disciplined art of cultivation, tulipomania denotes a collective delirium that transfigured a flower into a currency of pure, volatile desire. It is the merchant mortgaging his workshop for a striped bulb, the scratch of ink on a futures contract signed in a Leiden tavern, and the silent, communal shock when the music stopped and all that remained was common dirt—a testament to the human capacity to build entire worlds of meaning and loss upon the fragile stem of a blossom.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).