[Ads-l] "Making the nut" explained

[Dan Goncharoff]

Why I love this list: a quick search for "making the nut" found a 1917 use
in The Billboard, May 19, 1917, talking about circuses (!), and which also
used the phrase "a bit of velvet". I was unfamiliar with the latter phrase,
so I learned something, and note that it is an interesting usage after
OED's 1912 cite, which still has velvet it quotes.

DanG

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 9:04 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      "Making the nut" explained
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A discussion on another list, one devoted to baseball in the 19th century,
> began with a report of a travelling team being stranded on the road when
> their money ran out.  This lead to someone using the term "making the nut"
> -- covering one's expenses.  One of the members offered the following.
> A good number of year's ago a NYC theater and film critic friend (now
> retired) explained to me that the expression, "Making the nut" was an early
> term which originated in times when a traveling circus or troupe would have
> to surrender the nut holding their wagon wheels in place until they had
> satisfied their expenses (usually the fee guaranteed the owners of the
> grounds where they set-up on) so that they couldn't pull up stakes in the
> middle of the night without paying the rental fees or other expenses.
>
> Neither HDAS nor OED, which depends on HDAS for its earliest citations,
> support this explanation.  Their earliest citation is from the very early
> 20th C.  When I passed on the OED entry to the baseball nuts, I included
> the OED's note attached to another figurative sense of "nut", that it
> alluded to the difficulty in cracking a nut's hard shell, which I suppose
> explains the "making the nut" idiom.
>
> GAT
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998..
>
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