Nutmeg, known since antiquity for its culinary and medical properties, entered Europe in the Middle Ages through the port of Venice, by the Arab traders who carried it from the Indian Ocean, yet not revealing the actual source.
The high prize of the spice, sometimes equalling its weight in gold, was mainly a result of the belief that it could prevent the spreading around bubonic plague. Unfortunately, these believes turned out wrong, but Europeans had discovered nutmeg’s hallucinogenic effects.
The effects are believed to have been firstly recorded in the 12th century, by the German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, preaching that nutmeg biscuits should be eaten regularly to increase joy and positivity. Yet the first official recorded use of the word in print comes from the British Foreign Office Records of 1387. In the following couple of years, the nutmeg appeared in both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Sir Thopas and John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things.
By the late 1400, the Portuguese took control over the spice trade to be later replaced by the Dutch, with whom the Brits fought to get access to the rare spice, which name the English adopted from the Latin (nux ‘nut’ + muscat) through the Old French nois muguete, unexplained alteration of nois muscade ‘nut smelling like musk.’
The nutmeg’s value led to exporters adding wooden replicas into the sacks, which practise enriched the Victorian slang of the late 1800s, adding the phrase being nutmegged with the meaning of ‘to be tricked or deceived, especially in a manner which makes the victim look foolish and the trickster clever.’
And as France is currently hosting the European Football Championship, it is just the right time to discuss nutmeg in terms of football terminology. In football, a nutmeg is the technique of rolling the ball between an opponent’s legs. And as some of the best nutmeg artists, as Messi, Ronaldo and Kaka, know it well, a successful nutmeg could elicit the crowds and revitalise the team, but when it is unsuccessful, it could lead to a game-changing counter attack.
A plausible theory is that the term derived in football from the above-described idiomatic meaning, yet another one suggests that the skill of placing the ball between an opponent’s legs was named after a quite different slang usage of the term nuts and nutmegs – as synonyms of testicles, which dates back to mid 1600, with first use in print coming from English Ballads of 1690: “I’ll immediately whip out your nutmegs, he cried.”
