[Ads-l] "Making the nut" explained

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Apr 29 23:36:28 UTC 2015


On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 12:28 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com>
quoted:

> > 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_.
>

I don't understand. Except for that of the black walnut, for anyone with a
nutcracker or just a random stone, there's no difficulty in cracking a
nut's hard shell such as to explain the "making the nut" idiom. And, even
if there was any difficulty in cracking a nut's hard shell, how does that
"explain" the idiom?

Am I completely missing the point? There's always a very good possibility
that that is the case, when I'm the only one with a question. :-(



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list