The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

In a Nutshell

Shells are strewn all over the beaches of the English language. Artillery, for example, can shell a town, on the basis that the earliest grenades looked a little like nuts in their shells. It’s difficult to get a nut out of its shell, and it’s also difficult to get money out of a debtor. That’s why when you do manage it, you have made him shell out.

Hamlet said that he ‘could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’, but that’s not the origin of the phrase in a nutshell, which goes back to a deliciously unlikely story recounted by the Latin writer Pliny.

Pliny was a Roman encyclopaedist who tried to write down pretty much everything he’d ever heard. Some of his writings are an invaluable source of knowledge; others are pretty hard to believe. For example, Pliny claimed that there was a copy of The Iliad so small that it could fit inside a walnut shell. The weirdest thing about that story is that it’s probably true.

In the early eighteenth century, the Bishop of Avranches in France decided to put Pliny to the test. He took a piece of paper that was 10½ inches by 8½ (this book is about 8 inches by 5), and started copying out The Iliad in the smallest handwriting he could manage. He didn’t copy the whole thing, but he fitted 80 verses onto the first line and therefore worked out that, as The Iliad is 17,000 verses long, it would easily fit onto the piece of paper. He then folded the paper, sent for a walnut, and proved Pliny right, or at least feasible.[15]