The informal adjective
nuts dates to the early 1900s but
developed from an earlier 17th-century slang meaning often found in
phrases like "nuts to me" and "nuts for me," where it referred to a
source of delight, as in this quote from English satirist Jonathan
Swift's
A Journal to Stella (1766): "Why, we had not one word
of quarrel; only he railed at me when I was gone: and Lord Keeper and
Treasurer teased me for a week. It was nuts to them; a serious thing
with a vengeance." The use likely had something to do with the taste of
the dry fruit
or seed since early figurative examples of the noun
include the expression "nuts and cheese." Adjectival use, typically
describing enthusiasm about or fondness for someone or something came
about in the late 18th century. In Britain, the term was often used in
the phrase "dead nuts on," as "She is dead nuts on the boy next door."
The notion that enthusiasm and infatuation often lead to obsession may
have played a role in the early 20th-century senses of
nuts denoting extreme devotion, as in "nuts about baseball," and functioning as a synonym of "insane."
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