By Anatoly Liberman
Last week I mentioned the idiom to be (dead) nuts on ‘to be in love with’ and the verb spoon ‘to make love’ and promised to say something about both. After such a promise our readers must have spent the middle of January in awful suspense. So here goes. The semantic range of many slang words is often broad, but the multitude of senses attested for Engl. nut (see the OED) is amazing. I will reproduce some of them, both obsolete and current: “a source of pleasure or delight” (“To see me here would be simply nuts to her”), nuts in the phrases to be (dead) nuts on “to be in love of, fond of, or delighted with,” to be nuts about, as in “I was still nuts about Rex,” and to be nuts “go mad” (hence nutjob ~ nut job ~ nut-job “madman; idiot” and nutsy “crazy”). The exclamation nuts! means “nonsense,” while, contrary to expectation, the nuts signifies an excellent person. It will be seen that the senses can be positive, as in “a source a delight” (here are two more examples from my reading: “An English country gentleman might express himself concerning an agreeable incident: ‘It was nuts’” and “To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call ‘nuts’ to Scrooge”), and negative (“madness; stupidity”). Consequently, tracing nuts to German von Nutzen “of use” would be a false move (this origin of nuts has been proposed by a good German scholar). In etymological works, it is common to preface a hypothesis by a disclaimer to the effect that someone may have offered the same hypothesis, but the author is ignorant of it. I am obliged to do the same: my idea is so obvious, even trivial, that it must have occurred to anyone who wondered what nuts (as in hazelnuts or peanuts) have to do with either extreme pleasure or derangement.
The slang word nut in the singular is also frequent, but we note that in all the examples given above the plural nuts occurs. I suspect that the story begins with nuts “testicles,” even though the earliest recorded examples of this sense are late (however, it must have been so well-known in the United States more than a hundred years ago that The Century Dictionary included it). Nuts and genitalia have been compared for centuries. Thus, nut occurred with the sense of “the glans penis,” and the Germans call this part of the male organ of procreation Eichel “acorn” (in older writings on the history of words the glosses in such situations were always given in Latin; those who are embarrassed by plain English are welcome to use membrum virile). I suggest that nuts emerged as a loose word for expressing a strong feeling: nuts! “nonsense,” nuts! “wonderful,” nuts! “crazy,” and so forth. Such an exclamation can express any emotion. Nut “head” is probably an independent coinage (the head has been likened to all kinds of oblong and round objects in many languages); hence off one’s nut, though nuts “mad” may have reinforced that phrase. (The Russian verb o—et’, whose middle contains the most vulgar and formerly unprintable name for “penis,” means “to become mad”—another instance of genitalia and madness being connected; compare the metaphorical sense of Engl. prick).
Naturally, since nuts existed, the singula
