Nuts

Hi everyone,

I can say I have been saving things too much for too long now. Perfectionist as I may be, there is surely a sort of ultimate extent to which I can delay posts in order to come up with something innovative and interesting.

But that limit is far gone and I still didn't want to publish anything. Then the gods decided to make something happen, and a divine poke woke me up. Thanks Dio!

Before I go ahead with the main content of this post, I'd like to update you on what has been my recent English activity. Well, I have recently finished reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (fabulous book by the way, wrote by Robert Louis Stevenson) and dove into a (unexpected) reading, The Road to Reality—A complete guide to the laws of the universe, by Roger Penrose. As the latter author was a complete strange to me, I decided to do a little search on his background.

Penrose (Sir Penrose, as I happened to learn) happens to be a little more famous than I expected. There's even (sic) a page on him at Wikipedia. The "praise for the book" (section in a book where quotes of newspaper and magazines telling us how great the book is are displayed) as well as a section on the author told me a little about him— for example, that he has worked with Stephen Hawkings, and he lectures at Oxford. All in all (and as far as I can tell just by its beginning) this seems to be a enriching reading experience. Future will tell.

Now back to the main point of this post (which will seem rather short when compared to all the talking about books above)—nuts.

I learned two expressions with the word nuts (more precisely, nut) recently. I must tell that by then the only thing I could remember was that going nuts is the same as going mad, plus that The Nutcracker's Suit is the name by which I recognise the geat work of Tchaikovsky.

At first they startled me, really, because I couldn't make out their sense. These expressions were of the sort of words that are a nut to crack. There are some people as well (coming to think of it), which are a (hard or tough) nut to crack.

In a nutshell, if something is a nut to crack, it is a difficult problem to solve, or a person (difficult) to understand. I could say, for example, that throughout my life some girls have been a nut to crack to me.

On the other hand, in a nutshell is used to say in one (or the smaller possible number of) word(s), as in

There is more to playing go than just reading variations. It is required that the good player displays a sharp judgment of the equilibrium of the positions, a certain patience when pondering, and yet the energy necessary to pursue eagerly and passionately the counterattack when under disadvantage—something that a computer cannot achieve. If we then bear in mind that the mere reading of sequences is out of question (given the astronomical number of them), we could say, in a nutshell, that a good go player needs to have instinct tempered with wisdom.

And that's all for now, folks!