On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 16:11:53 -0400
"Joe AutoDrill" wrote:

"Leon Fisk" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 08:02:30 -0400
"Joe AutoDrill" wrote:

snip
...Which brings up the age old question: Where did the term
"dead nuts" come from?

I know you're just having some fun with this, but this link has a good
collection of possibilities:

http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?t=4757

I'm actually pretty serious about finding out... It comes up here at the
shop at least one a month.

Well I checked one other source right off, he hadn't written up
anything on that term yet. You could sign up at his site and ask the
question. Dave has a discussion/forum area. See:

http://www.wordorigins.org/

The link I posted covers a lot of sources. I think you will have a hard
time finding much more info than that. Quite a few of my better
reference books are quoted/used in that article.

The Google Books Project has been pushing antedates back for terms like
this with great regularity. Still takes some follow up though, their
OCR process also introduces quite a few errors...

--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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