Meaning
A worthless imitation passed off as the genuine article; a petty fraud or sham product. Now dated and mostly historical, surviving mainly in discussions of Connecticut folklore and old-fashioned American humour. Dated and historical; jocular rather than biting when used today. Regional use: American English.
Origin
The phrase grew out of a nineteenth-century American legend that crafty Connecticut Yankee peddlers carved wooden nutmegs and palmed them off on gullible customers as the valuable spice. The Connecticut State Library, citing Shankle's State Names, Flags, Seals (1941), reports that early residents were reputed so ingenious and shrewd that they could make and sell wooden nutmegs, and that the story seems to originate with Sam Slick, the fictional Yankee peddler created by the Nova Scotian judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton. ConnecticutHistory.org states plainly that no lasting credible evidence exists that such fakes were ever sold, and an alternative account proposed by Elizabeth Abbe in 1980 holds that peddlers sold real nutmegs, which buyers unfamiliar with the spice did not know must be grated, and mistook for wooden duds. Either way the legend stuck, and it lies behind Connecticut's unofficial nickname, the Nutmeg State, in use by the late nineteenth century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- sell someone a wooden nutmeg
- the wooden nutmeg story
- wooden nutmegs
Usage Examples
- The lifetime guarantee proved a wooden nutmeg: handsome on paper, worthless when tested.
- Nineteenth-century satirists dismissed the new party's platform as a wooden nutmeg carved for gullible voters.
- Any scheme promising to double your savings in a year is a wooden nutmeg, however sincere the salesperson.