In A Nutshell

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tom.

Hi, Tom. Where are you calling from?

Hey, I’m calling from Anderson, Indiana.

Anderson, Indiana. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Hey, Tom. What’s up?

All right. Thank you very much. It’s good to talk to both of you.

My pleasure.

I’ve got a simple question. I’ve always used the phrase in a nutshell, and I was just kind of curious about if this is a thing that’s here locally in the United States or if it’s a global phrase. Where did it originate from? I was just kind of curious about that.

So you use it when what? When you’re explaining something simply?

Yeah.

You know, if you’re talking to somebody and you’re just talking about something specific and they say, yeah, that’s basically it. They’ll agree with you and say, basically, you got it in a nutshell. That’s basically it in a nutshell.

Gotcha.

I use it all the time, but I just never really had any idea of the origin. I figured you guys would know.

Yeah, we do. This is a really, really clear etymology. It goes all the way back to antiquity, as a matter of fact.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Roman historian Pliny, who died in 79 A.D. with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, writes that Cicero, the orator, claimed that the entire Iliad, Homer’s Iliad, was once written on pieces of parchment and put into a nutshell, that it was that small, this manuscript. So there’s a reference to a manuscript that’s absolutely tiny and could fit into a nutshell.

What kind of nut are we talking about?

That’s so amazing. I had no idea that that was… That’s really, really amazing.

Yeah, isn’t that crazy?

Yeah, probably a walnut. Something like that. Because if it’s in a coconut, it’s not that amazing, right?

Right, right.

But supposedly, this has got to be tiny, tiny writing, because supposedly the Iliad itself contains over 500, 1,000 Greek letters. So that’s going to be either really tiny writing or a really big nut.

Right.

And so then you see this in English, like all the way back to the late 16th century, people talking about an Iliad in a nutshell. And the phrase after that was, I’ll give you an Iliad in a nutshell or something like that. And eventually it was shortened to, it was put into a nutshell. It was shortened into in a nutshell.

So the context or the meaning behind it has actually changed over time then.

Yeah, it went from being just at one particular work being made so small as to fit into the tiny quarters of a nutshell to being anything made short or brief so that it could figuratively fit into a nutshell.

That’s really amazing.

Yeah, right?

The roots.

The roots of what we speak. It’s really odd. We have a lot of little phrases and sayings that I guess we kind of take for granted that we use them, but maybe we really don’t know the real meaning behind them.

Tom, you put it in a nutshell. That is exactly what this show tries to do.

That’s what we’re all about, for sure.

Thanks, man. Appreciate the call.

Hey, thank you very much. Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

For a moment of linguistic kind of joy, the fact that we can actually trace this one to its roots. Because usually it’s like, I don’t know, but I think this one we have it.

Some say, others say.

Yeah, this one’s pretty clear. Not much doubt here.

And Shakespeare used it that way in Hamlet. He’s the great popularizer.

Yeah, in a nutshell.

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