Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and in a nutshell, this is going to be an episode about the origin of the phrase “in a nutshell.” This phrase, as far as we know, first appeared in Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History. Pliny was quoting Cicero, who claimed for some reason that Homer had written the Illiad on a parchment small enough to be enclosed in a nutshell. This was supposed to indicate that someone had incredibly detailed eyesight. Really it sounds like an exercise in creative writing, but we’ll leave that one up to the historians.
Nowadays, the phrase is used metaphorically to describe a summary of a longer work. In a nutshell, it’s a useful phrase with an interesting and long history.
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