The other day, someone asked me how I come up with the topics I write about. I answered honestly: I don’t know. Obviously, current events are a source. But ultimately, a topic must be interesting to me. I do this (blogging) for fun, the way some people play golf or collect stamps. If it was all current events all the time, then it would be you-know-who all the time, and that would be extremely tedious and not much fun (for me). If this blog was focused on advocacy, then that would “restrict” me to a single topic, as in an earlier iteration ten+ years ago when I was focused on gay marriage and LGBTQ+ equality in general. I am no less committed to those things today, but occasionally I want to write about ketchup.
Really, my only rule, if you can call it that, is “write when you have something to say, don’t say something because you have to write.” So, awhile back I had a glass of fruit punch with my dinner. I enjoyed it. It stirred up fond memories of my childhood in the 70s; anybody else remember Punchy who famously asks Oaf, “Hey! How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?” just before he socks him in the jaw?
But it got me to thinking why is ‘fruit’ slang for “homosexual,” and why do we describe effeminate men as being ‘fruity?’ So I made a note in my journal to circle back around to this at some point. I don’t eat a lot of fruit (and I’ll stop you’re mind wandering into “dirty” places right now because I’m not having a post devolve into raunchy double entendre, not today anyway!), but isn’t fruit one of the five daily food groups you’re encouraged by the USDA to eat from in order to ensure a balanced diet that provides essential nutrients and vitamins? Rhetorical question, because it is. If fruit is good for you, how did it come to be associated with something thought-to-be bad? And how are bananas involved?
While doing a deep dive on ‘fruit’ as slang over the weekend, I came across references to a 1935 glossary of criminal jargon called The Underworld Speaks in which “He’s bananas” was said to mean “He’s sexually perverted; a degenerate.” Also, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that using fruit to mean “male homosexual” first turned up in the US in the 1930s, possibly as prison slang; but it seems to have then been appropriated by the British gay community via the linguistic phenomenon known as Polari, which was an elaborate and obscure coded language used among gay men in the UK before homosexuality was decriminalized there in order to maintain their cover. Polari is fascinating; it developed out of necessity – it really was the language of the closet. Polari relied heavily on food references, like ‘seafood’ which meant “attractive sailors” and ‘meat and two veg’ (do I need to spell that one out for you?), so fruit would seem to fit right in.
‘Fruit’ meaning “homosexual” pops up in the 60s in Canada, which had its own version of the Lavender Scare (gays in the State Department…oh no!), where a lie-detector used as a pretext for firings was known as the “fruit machine,” and in the 70s in the US where the gay rights slogan “Squeeze a fruit for Anita” was a backhanded dig (and a bit of a double entendre) at the high-profile anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant who was also the spokesperson for Florida orange juice.
Anita Bryant and her blatant homophobia were nuts. And that raises the question “When and why did a tasty shell-encased fruit come to mean crazy?” I mean we know a nut is the thing a bolt screws into, but there is nothing inherently crazy about hardware. We know that a nut is the part of a musical instrument’s neck that the strings rest on; but how do we get to crazy from there?
The answer lies in late 18th century British slang wherein a person who was enthusiastically fond of something (or someone) was said to be “nuts upon” it (or them), in the same way we’d say “crazy about…” in the US today. The implication was they were so fascinated, infatuated, or distracted that they were effectively insane. But that still doesn’t explain why a nut was chosen to represent insanity.
The closest I came to an answer fails because the timeline doesn’t work. It was maybe 50 years later, i.e., by the mid-19th century, that in Britain a slang term for a person’s head was their nut (no real stretch there), and so to be ‘off one’s nut’ meant “crazy.” But we know that in the previous century Britons already used ‘nuts’ when someone was crazy for someone or something.
Like people who are crazy for tomatoes. Now, a knowledgeable person, or just someone like me who knows how to use the Internet to look things up, knows that a tomato is a fruit, because “botanically, a fruit is a ripened flower ovary and contains seeds.” But only a nut would put tomatoes in a fruit salad!
So there you have it. The origins of a post:
Fruit punch –> criminals’ slang –> bananas –> gays –> homophobia –> crazy orange juice lady –> tomatoes.
Told you I like writing about ketchup. And how’s this for spooky? The guy who asked me where I get my ideas for posts retired to Palm Springs after working for Heinz, who, among other things, make ketchup. That’s just nuts!