Research question of the day comes from Ms. Medway: why does nuts mean crazy?
As it turns out, nuts has a pretty interesting little history, as Daniel Engber explains here. Here's the upshot:
People were nuts about nuts. In the late 19th 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 20th century.
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You learn something new (although not necessarily valuable) every day.
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