Chaplin's Nuts

To behave erratically is to be seen as nuts and to be labelled nuts is to be seen as deranged.But it wasn't always like this.Since Anglo-Saxon times, nuts have primarily been the inner kernel of certain kinds of fruit, the final form of the seed from which this or that lifeform grew.And yet, beginning with the term's very first recorded usage, the nut has also contained the suggestion of a human mind-even if only proleptically.The late twelfth century manuscript, Peri Didaxeon, is a medical text translated from Latin into Old English.It contains a list of nuts, 'pinhutena cyrnles & amigdalas & oera hnutena cyrnlu,' which we can reword into modern English as 'pine-nuts, almonds, and other nut kernels.' 1 Here that second nut, the almond, shares its name with a multifaceted nuclear complex living within the cerebral hemisphere of all vertebrates.The amygdala regulates fear and aggression, controls emotional processing, and shapes self-perception.It is, ultimately, the neural form of our personhood-the primeval ur-nut.But we are already well ahead of ourselves.The amygdala, which visually resembles the almond, would only be identified centuries later, in 1822, by Karl Friedrich Burdach, the celebrated neurophysiologist who also coined the term 'biology.'While official etymology does not associate the name William Shakespeare with nuts, his plays are full of them.Centuries before anyone would speak of the proverbial peanut gallery, the Globe Theatre was littered with nutshells, both real and figurative, in ways that give rise to an assortment of personifying metaphors.This is especially true of those plays written a year either side of 1600.In Troilus and Cressida, cranial and neural obliteration is described as having to 'crack a fusty nut with no kernel.'In All's Well That Ends Well, the nutshell is the human face of outward appearances, for it is said 'there can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.'And, in As You Like It, the metaphor is charged with romantic intensity: Rosalind is described as the 'sweetest nut hath sourest rind' while, inversely, Orlando is described to Rosalind 'as concave as a covered goblet or a worm-eaten nut.' 2 If,