During my afternoon snack of pistachios, I began to ponder: when did ‘nuts’ begin to mean ‘insane’?

Nuts are delicious and healthy (yes, yes, ball joke). But there is nothing spectacular or bizarre or even shocking about any nut I’ve ever tasted (settle down, Beavis). So how have these tasty, uninspiring niblets of protein come to represent an unstable, bizarre, or confused person? Is it that they are considered both fruit and seed? Is it their complex appearances? The way the flavor haunts your tongue?

I did a wee bit of googling and found this great Slate piece about it. Turns out it’s just a case of terminology evolution:

“People were nuts about nuts. In the late 19^th century, the British used “nuts” as slang for something they found enjoyable: Jack Straw would have been far from “nuts” on the idea of bombing Iran. (This usage may have originated in an old cliché—”sweet as a nut.”) Being nuts on something meant you really liked it, but so did being “crazy on something.” It’s possible that “nuts” became a synonym for “crazy” because of this similarity. In any case, Americans were the first to connect the two, in the early 20^th century.

The noun form “nut,” meaning “crazy person,” may have a different history. By the mid-1800s, nut was slang for head. If someone said you were “off your nut,” that would mean you were crazy.”

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