Nuts, nostalgia and ‘as sweet as a nut’.

Image courtesy of Francesco Cavallini on UnsplashNuts as Christmas treats

Christmas can be a time of great nostalgia for me – as for many of you, I’m sure.

My parents died too soon decades ago, so my living memory of them, sadly, grows dimmer by the year. But certain scenes never fade.

One such is my father on Boxing Day cracking shells from a bowl chocka with assorted nuts. You’ll know what I mean if you’re older – the nuts you could then only ever find at Christmastide (I choose the archaic word deliberately), not the neatly packaged health foods you can nowadays buy come rain come shine. Walnuts, with their knobbly locket shape and fragile shell that yields so easily to the nutcracker, and then their neat brain-like fruit inside; Brazil nuts, with their elephant-hide shell; almonds, with their intriguingly pitted husks; and the glossy almost-wood of hazelnut shells.

I can still picture in my mind’s eye the simple silvery metal nutcracker that almost floated atop the inviting cornucopia of nuttiness when I was a child and how my father loved to splinter the shells open.

And I can still picture the earnest way in which he splintered them. (I always knew when he was concentrating hard because his lower jaw dropped away so his teeth did not meet. It’s a trait I’ve inherited.) Cracking nuts was a hallowed ritual, as was savouring the Stilton you only ever ate at that season, or the tangerines or clementines, mysteriously unavailable otherwise.

As sweet as a nut

This year I had a walnut epiphany – forgive my pretension, but there’s no other way to describe it. Fresh ones, straight out of the shell, have a taste all their own, buttery and smooth and sweet, completely different from the packaged ones.

Which made me think of the phrase my partner occasionally uses: as sweet as a nut.

What does it mean? They use it to mean what it says: a simile for something deliciously sweet. And that’s how it appears in the first OED citation. That citation apparently refers to palm hearts, then known as ‘palm cabbages’:

The Cabbage itself when it is taken out of the Leaves..is as white as Milk, and as sweet as a Nut if eaten raw.

William Dampier A New Voyage around the World vii. 166, 1697

Image courtesy of Congerdesign on Pixabay

Apart from being a rapacious buccaneer, Dampier was also an acute and well-informed naturalist. He is the first person to describe banana, plantain and breadfruit in English, and his A New Yoyage was a literary success.

But as sweet as a nut has a long pedigree as a colloquial underworld phrase, which the OED doesn’t record but Jonathon Green’s magisterial Dictionary of Slang does, meaning ‘simple, easy, delightful, especially of a robbery.

The first citation given rhymes and is decades earlier than the Dampier one.

He puts / His hands, to feele for Lockwoods guts, / Which came not foorth so sweet as Nuts.

R. Speed The Counter–Scuffle, 1628

Nuts

Nuts feature in two types of metaphor The first is a euphemism for, ahem, testicles. Clearly perceived similarity of shape is the root or the ‘grounds’ of the metaphor.

The popular Australian brand of edible nuts ‘Nobby’s Nuts’ exploits potential double-entendres to the full, particularly in an ad it used a while back: ‘Nibble Nobby’s Nuts.’

(I’d always assumed ‘Nobby’ was an invented name to provide alliteration with ‘nuts’. I was wrong. So Wikipedia informs me, it was the nickname of the company’s founder, Anthony ‘Nobby’ Noblet [1913–1995]).

English uses the nut metaphor, but Spanish prefers eggs (among other possibilities) – huevos – as do Russian and German, with яйца and Eier.

Portuguese and Italian are more prosaic with their ‘balls’, palle and bolas. In this connection, avocados are a hidden testicle metaphor: the word derives ultimately from Nahuatl aguacatl, which in the sixteenth century could denote both the fruit and by metaphorical extension, the body part. The word seems not to be used in that sense nowadays, but the Mexican word for ‘avocado’ aguacate, which clearly derives from aguacatl, denotes the fruit and the appendage.

The second metaphor is for the head, again, of course, the grounds being the shape. First recorded in 1841, according to the OED, but before 1790 according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Nuts is first recorded in Grose’s slang dictionary A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785, meaning, as the OED puts it, ‘to be infatuated with someone; to hold something in high esteem’. From there it was only a short semantic hop, skip and jump to its meaning, originally U.S., of ‘mad, deranged, eccentric’ from 1908 according to the OED, but 1840, according to Green.  

Image courtesy of T.L. Strot on Unsplash

We […] found them waiting on the beach, and a little afraid about going off, as the surf was running very high. This was nuts to us.

R.H. Dana Two Years before the Mast (1840: 1992) 219

What struck him? He must be nuts.

1908   H. C. Fisher in San Francisco Examiner 8 Jan. 9 (comic strip)   

Finally, talk of testicles reminds me of that adage my father taught me to remember how to make the sign of the cross on one’s body. Irreverent though it is, it can be helpful for a man: spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch, i.e. up, down, left, right, left being where the wallet would be in one’s breast pocket and right where a fob watch might once have been found.

Should you ever be in need of an adjective to describe botanical nuts, there is the combining form prefix nuci– from the Latin for ‘nut’, nux, nucis f., which gives e.g. nuciferous (nut-bearing) and nucivorous (nut-eating), not to mention its Romance offspring noix, noce, nuez, etc.