Contextualizebeta

nutpick

noun

Etymology

Blend of nut + nitpick; see nut (“crazy person”). Coined by a commenter in 2006 and popularized by Kevin Drum.

  1. derived from *bew-✻
  2. inherited from *pikkōną✻ — “to pick, peck, prick, knock”
  3. inherited from *pikkōn✻
  4. inherited from *piccian✻
  5. inherited from piken
  6. compounded as nutpick — “nut + pick”

Definitions

  1. A sharp tool used for digging the edible portion out of a nut.

  2. To cherry-pick poor representatives of a viewpoint (i.e., from Internet postings) in…

    To cherry-pick poor representatives of a viewpoint (i.e., from Internet postings) in order to disparage it.

    • Nutpicking has gotten easy over the last few years–just check out the Twitter feeds of Teanderthal Members of Congress.
    • If there’s a right-wing analog to the Media Matters machine, it often comes in the ongoing effort to “nutpick” radical professors, highlight their most ridiculous (and often years-old) comments, and try to drive them out of their jobs.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for nutpick. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA