[Ads-l] "Making the nut" explained

[George Thompson]

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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