Another version of the "truth":
The noun nitty-gritty dates from the mid-1900s and alludes to the detailed (“nitty”) and possibly unpleasant (“gritty”) issue in question.
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The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Yes, by, it came as a shock--a series of them, rather--to realize that for many many things there is no one, exact, right answer. And even now I find that thought unsettling. I want to know everything about something I'm interested in, right down to the last detail (though not necessarily the nitty gritty!
), and I want my knowledge to be concrete and certain. Grr. I grew up in an era (barely) that taught that "the guvmint" has the ultimate, and correct, answers. Well, it didn't take me long, once I started working for the state, to realize that
no one does. Government, and even the military, are made up of just people. Not necessarily the brightest and best, either.
As I said before, that kind of false historic revisionism for PC purposes irks me, mainly because I love history too much to subvert it falsely for modern agendas. And I'd feel the same about contrived etymologies for words and phrases to fit the same purposes (though I never gave this much thought, nor, indeed, harbored any notion that anyone would go to such lengths to garnish another notch on the PC belt until this thread, but evidently...sigh). I agree, Sweet WO'N. Though as I hinted in my paragraph above, I no longer trust that history really happened the way I was taught that it did. "History" is generally recorded by the victors, as my husband says; and he's right. To say nothing of laziness and outright falsehoods. I think one should be sure of one's facts, before yelling about political correctness; and even then, the caterwauling isn't always necessary. (For ex., something I've griped about here before: changing "man" or "men" in hymns written long ago to "all", or "people". Yuck!) We cannot make retribution for every wrong done down through history. Let's stick to what is relevant today.
