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Circa 1790: plants used in commerce, including nutmeg, tea and cotton plants. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption
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You may know nutmeg as an item that lives in your spice cabinet. But did you know its colorful verb form?
"You get nutmegged on the pitch — it's actually psychologically damaging," Solomon Tesfaye, 33, said on a muggy spring Monday at a pickup soccer game at Randall Field in Washington, D.C.
He was referencing a killer trick move in which a player kicks the ball through a defender's legs. Nutmegging is an artistic maneuver that the most skilled players pull off effortlessly, leaving the opponent spinning around in circles. Lionel Messi, Ronaldinho and Neymar can all do it with ease.
It can also be a "beautiful experience," according to Mawi Solomon, 29. Still, "it's a crazy word. It's a loaded word." Tesfaye chimed in to explain that "Mawi here and a few of the other guys I've played with have gotten nutmegged by me."
Solomon's mouth dropped open. "Misinformation right there," he said, laughing.
How did a spice turn into one of the most sought-after — and painful — trick moves in soccer? Two weeks before the start of the World Cup, this installment of NPR's Word of the Week explains how "nutmeg" became synonymous with duplicity: from spice traders to one of the world's most popular sports.
A spice steeped in dark history
A nutmeg is the seed of an evergreen tree. The outside of a nutmeg is somewhat yellow and looks similar to a walnut. (Don't forget this — it will be important later.)
The fruit is native to the Banda Islands, a small archipelago in eastern Indonesia, according to Michael Krondl, a food historian. Due to the rarity of the nutmeg, "it was one of the most valuable spices," Krondl said, until the 17th century, when the Dutch entered the picture.
The Dutch wanted to control the spice, and after years of resistance from the Bandanese, the Dutch governor-general of the Dutch East India Company decided it would be easier to get rid of the Bandanese to achieve their goal. He ordered the murder and destruction of the civilization.
Afterward, the Dutch had a complete monopoly on the "it" spice of the period, Krondl said. To this day, the Dutch have salt, pepper AND nutmeg on their dinner tables, he said.
By the mid-18th century, the American Colonies wanted the "highly prized" spice in all their food. As a result, "everything has nutmeg in it," said Sarah Lohman, a food historian and author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine.
"If you pull open a cookbook, we are nutmegging all over the place in the 1840s," Lohman said.
Connecticut gets a bad reputation
This leads to the 1833 story of the unscrupulous Connecticut peddlers. Connecticut engaged in extensive global trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, said Andy Horowitz, Connecticut's state historian. Horowitz calls it the "OG globalization" of the spice trade.
Here's how the story goes: Local traders, nicknamed "Yankees" from the Dutch epithet for English settlers, sold pounds of nutmegs, mixed with fake wooden nutmegs, across the world. Nutmegs are known for their fragrant smell, and a wooden nutmeg could hide within the aroma of the others.
Written texts further break down the sentiment around these Yankees. In Men and Manners in America by Scottish author Thomas Hamilton, "the whole race of Yankee peddlers in particular are proverbial for their dishonesty" and "lie, cog, cheat, swindle."
Farther north in Canada, satirist Thomas Chandler Haliburton wrote about the story of Samuel Slick of Slickville and Captain John Allspice in The Clockmaker. Slick is called a "Yankee peddler, a cheatin' vagabond, a wooden nutmeg." From there, the term "wooden nutmeg" became synonymous with trickery, and Connecticut became known as the Nutmeg State.
"That carries right into its usage … in soccer, with the kind of shrewd maneuver of outsmarting your opponent, kicking the ball right between their legs," said Horowitz, who is also a history professor at the University of Connecticut. "That could be like the ability to sell them a fake wooden nutmeg."
Lohman, the food historian, wrote about the ruse — and even tried it out. She asked a friend to carve a wooden nutmeg. The result?
"I deem the story of the wooden nutmeg plausible," she said, chuckling.
But is that really how it entered the soccer world?
Linguists who spoke to NPR can't say for sure how the slang ended up on the soccer pitch. Among the problems: The word's association with trickery disappeared for a century before reappearing in soccer.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest use in soccer from the former English soccer player Rodney Marsh's 1968 book, Shooting to the Top, and then in 1970s newspapers. "This is a real puzzle," said Suzanne Kemmer, a professor of linguistics and cognitive sciences at Rice University.
There are a few other potential ways the word sneaked into soccer. It could be a euphemism for a male body part, said Michael Adams, a provost professor of English at Indiana University. It could also be Cockney rhyming slang, a form of English slang that originated in London — but Kemmer said she can't find any connection to "nutmeg" in the unofficial dictionary.
"That's what we would call, in etymology, a documentary gap," said Kemmer. There are instances of "nutmeg" used in different ways throughout history, but no definitive line into the soccer world. A 2004 book by Peter Seddon, Football Talk: The Language & Folklore of the World's Greatest Game, is often cited with originating the theory of the 1800s traders, but the actual evidence is lacking, etymologists said.
Regardless of the precise story, nutmegging still found its way into popular culture. Adams said that folk etymology, when people coalesce around a subculture, can happen with slang words.
"There's a sense in which it becomes true because it's what you all believe and talk about," he said.
Back at Randall Field in D.C. with Tesfaye and Solomon, a mix of languages echoed across the park. Bachir Sabo explained that in French, "nutmeg" translates to petit pont (small bridge). And it's el caño (pipe) or túnel (tunnel) in Spanish, said Juan Diaz.
Of course, no one on the field was particularly focused on where the word came from. They'd rather master the skill.
In a flash, Diaz, originally from Colombia, ran across the field and delivered a nasty nutmeg through his opponent's legs, eliciting a "NICE" from a teammate. The ball flew up the field and then — swoosh — it landed into the goal.
(The nutmegged defender declined to be interviewed for this story.)
