August 24, 2001

nuts

Call me nuts, but I have never understood how this protein-rich fruit came to be another word for 'insane'.

Early citations about the edible dry fruit (starting from c875) were nothing if not positive. Its sweetness and ripeness were often commented upon with delight. Who could have guessed that the nut would drift into insanity? But something about it (color? size? shape? shell?) lends itself to use in proverbs, allusions, metaphor, and an abundance of surprisingly disparate slang senses. Out of these, there appear to be two metaphorical threads that wind their way to 'crazy', one relating to emotions, the other to the mind.

From the 17th century to the early part of the 20th, one sense of adjectival nuts was 'extremely pleasing': "Tom had his store clothes on, and an audience--and that was always nuts for Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884). From the 1920s, the nuts could refer to something either 'extremely pleasing' or 'extremely unpleasant': "Now she's getting married! Isn't it the nuts?" (Magnum, P.I., CBS TV, 1981) vs. "It was the nuts to rot in a mudhole..., waiting to go home" (Stevens, Mattock, 1927). Even before that, by the late 18th century, someone could already be nuts on (or upon) something or someone in the very ways in which we now use nuts about or nuts over-- 'extremely enthusiastic about' or 'infatuated or in love with' (Give me that book; I'm just nuts about mysteries. He took one look and went nuts over her.) Note that crazy and mad can be used in some of the same contexts (think Mad about the Boy, the song by Noel Coward). And remember, some people equate infatuation--or even love--with insanity.

The second pertinent slang image arose in the mid-19th century, when nut, by analogy, came to mean 'head' (roundish shape; hard shell/skull; cracking it open reveals the tender contents; I'll go no further). At roughly the same time, off (or out of) one's head meant 'out of one's mind; crazy'. Off (or out of) one's nut followed with the same meaning within the next 20 years. To be nuts in the sense you ask about also emerged in the mid-1800s, probably through this association with head, and it is with us still: "There was a screw loose somewhere in him, he had a kink and he was a Crank, he was nuts and belonged in a booby hatch" (Carl Sandburg, American Mercury, 1928). The related use of the noun nut as a disparaging term for a person was a U.S. creation of the early 20th century. Keep in mind that these terms have traditionally referred to a wide range of people--from someone tragically suffering from a psychiatric condition (in which case using such epithets is unkind) to someone who is merely acting foolish (in which case they're probably taken as casual banter). They can even be used affectionately (You nut! You know you can't afford to give me a diamond this big!).

Enid