APAD: A sledgehammer to crack a nut
Meaning:
To use disproportionate force or expense to overcome a minor problem.
Background:
Sledgehammers are large iron hammers that were first used in England in the
15th century. These weren't tools to hammer sledges, the little ice trolleys
with runners that the young Citizen Kane was so fond of.
'Sledge' was the original name of this form of hammer, so 'sledgehammer' is
something of a tautology. 'Sledging' has recently reappeared as a verb form in
the previously refined and gentle world of cricket, where it means the
browbeating and harassment of the batsman by the fielders.
'Sledges' were an English invention but this phrase wasn't - it first saw the
light of day in 1850s America. 'A sledgehammer to crack a nut' is one of the
many versions of the phrase, the others having faded into disuse.
Pretty well anything which is small and easy to squash has come verbally under
the hammer, typified by nuts and insects. These have included peanuts, walnuts
or just nuts; also gnats, flies, mosquitoes etc.. The first to fall victim was
the humble fly, as in this piece from The Gettysburg Compiler, June 1878:
"Don't worry over little ills of life. It is like taking a sledge hammer to
kill a fly."
Nuts came into the picture a little later, specifically peanuts; for example,
this from The Reno Weekly Gazette And Stockman, May 1893:
"We know some men who are always looking for a sledge hammer to crack a
peanut."
Insects and nuts seem to have become combined in the later 'sledgehammer to
kill a gnat' version; for example, Grosvenor B. Clarkson's Industrial America
in The World War, 1923:
"The Board never used a sledgehammer to kill a gnat."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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In Chinese, we have "a cattle-knife to slay a chicken."
An idea in UNIX (an early operating system, the ancestor of those powering most
computer products today) was to create small software tools and combine them in
various ways to accomplish larger tasks. Sledgehammers of giant monolithic
programs were very much frowned upon.
