Why do we refer to people of questionable sanity as nuts, nutty, or nut-cases? In the early 1600s, a nut was considered something “pleasing” or “delightful.” Its meaning then transferred to someone who liked something pleasing, and then someone obsessed with that thing to the point of eccentricity or weirdness. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Nutty Nuts”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Grant. This is Lance in San Diego.
Hi, Lance. How are you doing?
Hello, Lance.
Welcome to the program.
I have a question for you. I was just wondering how the words nuts, nutty, and nutcase and the like come to mean people of questionable sanity in addition to the healthy proteins that grow on trees.
So nutty, nutcase, nuts, why do they all mean of questionable sanity?
That’s a really good question.
That’s a great question.
And to get this answer, we have to plumb the depths of history.
There’s kind of a tangled path here for each one of these terms.
Surprisingly, nutty, the adjective, is a little older than the other ones.
But let’s start for a second with nut.
By about the early 1600s, it started to mean something that was easy or pleasing or delightful.
And then just a little bit later, it starts to mean a person who likes a thing that is easy or delightful, right?
And then a little bit later, it starts to mean a person who not only likes something, but is a little obsessed about it and maybe crazy for it.
And then even just a little bit later, nut starts to mean actually someone who is insane or crazy or maybe something a little more muted like eccentric or odd or just weird.
So it goes from something desirable to the desire for it.
Yeah, this is kind of a pretty great case of semantic progression, meaning that the meaning moves slowly along over the decades and centuries, just subtly shifting from year to year and decade to decade, until when you look at the beginning and the end, they seem so drastically different, you can’t even imagine how one became the other.
But again, it’s pretty steady progression from meaning a thing that is delightful or easy to meaning someone who is not quite all there.
Lance, I get the impression that you’ve been puzzling over this one.
Yeah, I was just talking to somebody the other day, and it’s like, wait a minute, what am I saying?
I said that somebody was nutty, and I thought, where did that actually come from?
I mean, I’ve heard other people say it, but I was wondering what the origin of it was.
There had to be a reason for it.
Yeah, and there’s another kind of parallel track here, too.
This is for nut, and the nut was used to mean your head, kind of a joke.
Right, use your nut.
Yeah, use your nut.
But you could also be said to be out of your nut, the same way we might say out of your gourd, meaning insane.
And that was by about the 1840s or so, you could be out of your nut.
And this kind of happened independently, so you can see that there’s some semantic interweaving there, where these two meanings come together and probably reinforce each other and kind of just do their own thing separately, but at the same time reinforce the meaning of insane or crazy or not quite all there.
Now, of course, we have to acknowledge that calling somebody nuts as a way of saying that they’re crazy isn’t the best way to go about doing that, right?
You want to say insane or if they’re genuinely insane, but usually nut and nutty and nutcase.
Nutter and, yeah.
Yeah, they’re all meant informally and slangy and you wouldn’t use them in the newspaper really, right?
Probably not.
Probably not. Or an academic paper.
Right.
Or on the air.
Or maybe I would just say eccentric to be nice.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Lance, thanks for your question.
You’re very welcome.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
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