In a nutshell 의 유례

수업준비 하다가,
흔히 쓰는 'in a nutshell'(아주 분명히, 간단명료하게)이란 표현의 기원이 궁금하더군요.


두가지를 찾았는 데,

: IN A NUTSHELL - From the archives: Entry for "Nutshell", _Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_, E. Cobham Brewer, 1898: "The Iliad in a nutshell. Pliny tells us that Cicero asserts that the whole Iliad was written on a piece of parchment which might be put into a nutshell. Lalanne describes, in his Curiosités Bibliographiques, an edition of Rochefoucault's Maxims, published by Didot in 1829, on pages one inch square, each page containing 26 lines, and each line 44 letters. Charles Toppan, of New York, engraved on a plate one-eighth of an inch square 12,000 letters. The Iliad contains 501,930 letters, and would therefore occupy 42 such plates engraved on both sides. Huet has proved by experiment that a parchment 27 by 21 centimètres would contain the entire Iliad, and such a parchment would go into a common-sized nut; but Mr. Toppan's engraving would get the whole Iliad into half that size. George P. Marsh says, in his Lectures, he has seen the entire Arabic Koran in a parchment roll four inches wide and half an inch in diameter. (See ILIAD.) 1 
 
: To lie in a nutshell. To be explained in a few words; to be capable of easy solution."

from : Phrasefinder.org.uk

이것과, 

"In a nutshell," as I'm sure you know, means "in a few words," or "very briefly explained." Nutshells, being the "hard exterior within which the kernel of a nut is enclosed" (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary), don't get very big since nuts themselves are generally fairly small. (There probably was a Jurassic Walnut or something way back when that could easily squish Des Moines, but that screenplay is yet to be written.) Nutshells themselves were first used as metaphors for something very small back in 1602, when Shakespeare had Hamlet declare, "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count my selfe a King of infinite space." Anything that could fit "in a nutshell" would have to be pretty darn small, and by the 18th century all the major writers were cramming things into nutshells.

With a metaphor being as popular as "in a nutshell" has been, can a verb "to nutshell" (meaning to briefly summarize) be far behind? Well, before we all start groaning about "rampant verbification" and the decline of our language, some news: "to nutshell" has been around since 1883, first found in Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi."

source  

이것입니다. 


결국 요약하면,  
예전에, 아주 예전에는 글을 쓰면(양피지 등), 그걸 nutshell에 넣어 보관하곤 했다는 겁니다.
그리고 nutshell에 담긴다는 건, 아주 적은 양을 뜻하게 되었고,
그 의미가 확장되어 '간단하게' 정도의 뜻으로 쓰인다는 것이죠.