Soup to Nuts

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Matt calling from Noblesville, Indiana.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thank you.

What can we help you with?

Well, I work for a general contracting company, assembling job files, getting quotes from subcontractors and so forth.

And about a year or two ago, I started hearing people giving me a quote for something, and they would say that that quote was soup to nuts.

I kind of almost immediately knew what it meant as being a turnkey price. In other words, this is the complete price for this line of work or whatever.

But I don’t know what the heck soup has to do with nuts, what either of them have to do with construction, and where that terminology even came from.

Oh, interesting.

That is interesting, because it’s far beyond the construction world.

Really?

Yeah.

And even in the construction world, I’m surprised that you didn’t hear it on the Ace Hardware commercials that they played endlessly for years and years.

Oh, really? They have that on there?

Yeah.

Did they have nuts?

I kind of tune out advertising. That’s why I listen to NPR.

Okay.

Wait, on the Ace Hardware commercials, did they have soup and then the kind of nuts you put on a bolt?

Probably. I don’t know.

I don’t remember buying any soup at Ace Hardware, nor seeing it there.

I don’t remember there being a soup aisle next to the shoppacks.

Yeah, maybe corn nuts, but that’s about the most nuts you can see.

Ace Hardware.

Well, yeah, Matt, we can tell you this phrase has been around a long time, at least since the 1830s, soup to nuts.

And what it means is simply from the beginning to the end. It’s a reference to how people used to have long meals, starting with soup and ending with nuts for dessert.

Really? So it’s more of a culinary thing.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, exactly.

And as I said, it’s been used far outside the construction industry.

And it’s sort of like there’s a Latin expression. The ancient Romans used to say, ab ovo usque ad malum, which meant from the egg to the apple or the egg to the fruit.

And that was their long course dinner, starting with eggs. That was a big appetizer in ancient Rome.

So we’re talking about these rather sophisticated meals that involve more than one fork.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And napkins and things like that.

Cloth napkins.

I suppose in these days, those long drawn out meals don’t exist.

And I don’t normally associate, you know, walnuts or pecans with dessert so much as I would as a snack.

Well, that’s a good point.

All my long, drawn-out meals are because my son won’t eat.

Yeah, and they involve strained carrots or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, different story.

Ours usually involve puppet shows in the middle.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Let’s open the hangar so Mr. Airplane can fly in.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Matt, there you go.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Take care.

All right.

You guys have a great day.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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