Knowing the Nutshell

Weird and wonderful facts. I love them. I have a store house in my brain where random information that is pretty much useless in any given situation waits to be called on for the hell of it. I like to imagine it as an old library. Think of floor-to-ceiling bookcases with ladders here and there to reach the top shelves. Stacks of books that don't fit on the shelves. Ornaments and trinkets and knick-knacks collected throughout a life of adventure and travel. A comfy chair with a standing light. A little table to put my coffee on. (Okay so it's basically how I'm planning to have my home-library when I have space and money for a home-library.)

Anyway, back to facts and how much I love them. For example - and this is always what I bring out if someone asks me to tell them something random (which happens a lot less frequently than I would like) - I read a book about pirates and apparently there was a pirate called Captain Half-Arse because he had his left buttock blown off by a cannon.

Now that I think about it, I find myself wondering how he sat down.

I don't know whether it's a happy offshoot of being autistic, but I have always loved research and learning. I could spend hours and hours with books and the internet and documentaries - start with one thing, something interesting is mentioned, look it up, follow the breadcrumbs of tangents through a never-ending labyrinth of knowledge.

I remember when I tried to do an Access course in Art and Design at college (which I dropped fairly early on because it was taking away the enjoyment I had for art), my class was in the computer room and we were supposed to be researching a specific art movement. Funny, but I can't for the life of me remember what movement it was. I spent the entire time reading about the Russian revolution - the one with the Romanovs. In my defence, I had started with the art movement, but then it mentioned something which led me to something else and before I knew it, I was engrossed in something completely unrelated.

But I digress. I figured the little fact about Captain Half-Arse wasn’t really in-depth enough for a full story/article, so I decided to look at something I really find interesting – the origin of phrases, and by phrases, I mean idioms. So, I’ve chosen five well-known idioms in the English language to explore and discover where they came from. So without further ado, let’s get started.

In a nutshell: This idiom has a couple of sources before it came to be used in the way we know (“tell me the plan in a nutshell”). The first instance was by a Roman scholar called Piny the Elder who wrote about small objects and a keenness of sight for his encyclopaedia, Naturalis Historia. He used the term ‘in a nutshell’ when he writes that ‘Cicero informs us that the Iliad of Homer was written on a piece of parchment so small as to be enclosed in a nutshell’ (translation: John Bostock & H.T. Riley – London, 1855).

That is, however, a literal description for the actual size of a tiny parchment. Having said that, the meaning we have for the idiom now is still technically there – the Iliad is known as one of the great epics, implying a great size/length, right? So, in order to fit into a nutshell, it would have to be pared down to the absolute minimum, which is what we use the term ‘in a nutshell’ to mean, which is basically ‘give me the least amount of information where it still makes sense and no more’.

Interestingly, the first written use of the phrase as a metaphor is actually in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the eponymous hero states the following:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell

and count myself a king of infinite space;

Were it not that I have bad dreams.

In this scene, Hamlet is telling his friends how he feels imprisoned in Denmark, and that he could handle it if he were in the smallest of places (bounded in a nutshell) but the bad dreams make it unbearable.

Saved by the Bell: There are actually two different origins for this idiom. The first comes from around the 1600s or so, when bells were supposedly rigged into coffins so that if a person was wrongly pronounced dead and buried alive, they could ring the bell and be rescued. The fear of being buried alive was a very real danger in the 17th century, and there were such coffins, called ‘safety coffins’, patented. A relative would theoretically sit by the grave for 24 hours in case the bell rang. However, there is sadly no evidence that this actually resulted in someone being saved by the bell in this sense.

While I personally prefer that explanation, the phrase is actually boxing slang which came into use much later in the 19th century. The earliest reference was (according to phrases.org.uk via theuijunkie.com) found in a newspaper called The Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, from Massachusetts, in February 1893. The issue contained the following statement:

Martin Flaherty defeated Bobby Burns in 32 rounds by a complete knockout. Half a dozen times Flaherty was saved by the bell in the earlier rounds.

Let the Cat out of the Bag: As with ‘saved by the bell’, there are conflicting ideas of where this idiom comes from. The first one I learned came from the time of dungeons and torture – the torturer would keep his cat-o-nine-tails in a bag until he needed it. When his other methods failed to produce the results he needed, he would ‘let the cat out of the bag’, probably in front of the person being tortured for dramatic effect/scare tactics. The more likely idea in reference to the cat-o-nine-tails is that it was used as a punishment for sailors, which is more historically recorded than the torture idea.

Another theory is that it comes from pig markets when, instead of a pig, the shady vendors would put a cat in the bag in the place of a pig. If you let the cat out of the bag, you revealed the trick.

According to phrases.org.uk, the cat-o-nine-tails theory fails in that, as far as the punishment for sailors goes, it’s a disciplinary technique. The usage now is that to let the cat out of the bag is to reveal a secret of some kind, in which the first printed usage was in an issue of The London Magazine from 1760: “We could have wished that the author…had not let the cat out of the bag.”

The common usage lends more weight to the pig market theory, as that was a trick/secret.

Knock on Wood: Though some have tried to link this idiom with the cross on which Jesus was crucified, it is actually a fairly modern idiom. According to idiomorigins.org, the first cited use for ‘touch wood’ was in the late 19th century, while the American version ‘knock on wood’ was first seen in 1904. Further research led me to a page where many people commented on the origin and some interesting ideas were provided: one person said that it dates back to the 18th century auction where one would say touch wood in hope’s of winning as the auctioneer would touch wood at the winning bid. Another theory is that it is a sexual innuendo. A third said that it was part of children’s games, where if you touch wood, you’re safe – this is similar to when we used to play stuck in the mud on the school playground. The benches were ‘home’, so if we ran up and touched the bench, we were safe from being stuck.

Despite the many theories, there appears to be no consensus as to where the idiom actually originates, which in itself is quite interesting. Does that mean people who use the idiom to mean the same basic thing do so out of different beliefs?

Dressed to the nines: This is an idiom that has always bothered me but I’ve never got around to looking up, until now.

Apparently ‘to the nines’ was in use in the 18th century, such as in a poem by William Hamilton, 1719:

The bonny Lines therein thou sent me,

How to the nines they did content me.

The usage during the time meant to the highest standard or perfection.

It was later in the 19th century that the term ‘dressed to the nines’, as in to be dressed flamboyantly or smartly, was used. Phrases.org.uk gives the first written use of the phrase as that in an 1835 book called The Progressive Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Fallows.

The etymology of the use of the number nine remains elusive. Some have theorised that it relates to clothes and how they were made, but there is little to no evidence to support the theory.

Some attribute it to the long-held mysticism of the number nine as a superlative, with several religious/cultural groups having a special mythos of nine people to symbolise the noblest and most divine.

Again, there is no consensus as to the meaning of the nine in this idiom. Phrases.org.uk suggests that it is simply that nine = a lot. I’d build on that idea and say that if you go up the line, nine is the last single digit number. In numerology, where every multiple-digit number adds the digits until only a single digit remains (354 = 3 + 5 + 4 = 12, 1 + 2 = 3), nine would be the biggest remaining number. I have no supporting evidence but it’s an interesting concept.

And there you have it. As you probably noticed, it is difficult to find definitive origins for a lot of idioms, but some of the theories are really interesting, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed researching them.